Every year since 2004 I have been adding my own dumb and dumber awards. Usually is it a hard slog getting so many out the door, but why was 2007 different? Anyway sit back and have a giggle at some of the dumbest moments in real estate and technology for 2007.

PBL & MICROSOFT
1. It was without doubt the most anticipated launch of 2007 and is without doubt the worst major real estate website in Australasian history. I still cringe when looking at it. How could two major companies, Ninemsn and Microsoft get something so drastically wrong? Agents found themselves subscribed to a site they had never subscribed to, with listings sold years earlier. Agents also found that agents who no longer worked at their agency were listed alongside listings no longer under their agencies control.

2. MyHome struck a cord with only themselves and thus will fade further into oblivion in 2008 unless someone steps in and makes some radical changes. MyHome incorrectly perceived themselves as pretty cool. The standout memory for me was Senior Management in the Applesque (Steve Jobs) photo pose splashed in newspapers across the land. Soon, after all senior management had gone, the site tried in vain to claw back some respectability.

3. What do you do when you have a website with only 30% of your competitors’ listings and exactly the same data within that small percentage? What do you do when statistical data tells you that people stay on your website for less time than it takes to boil a kettle? It seems MyHome’s idea was to spend millions of dollars just telling everyone about it. When will it run out? Well, as soon as the people paying the bills ask one very simple question “What are we getting in return for our money?”

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Yes I know, yawn, but this one does show a little potential! Now I am sitting here eating my breakfast (Muesli, Pear, Apples and Bananas) and the first thing I did was swear ‘&%$#@$%’ and splatter my screen with the above mentioned ingredients.

The quote ‘but our users call us ‘The Google of Real Estate‘, no, you call yourself that and you are not alone! The site seems to scrape (I may be wrong) listings from LJ Hooker, Ray White, Centrury21, PRD Nationwide, Harcourts, Raine and Horne, Elders, First National and others and index these results into a Google style engine. The properties then link to the actual pages on the above sites.

The search is simple and the results darn ugly but it does have some potential. Getting this data and indexing it is one thing, but they must be able to update quickly so as to not carry older listings. They also have to overcome the fact that their bots may be banned from the site if they do not have permission.

However, this site is getting closer to what I would call a search engine, as these types of sites mature their bots will have to become smarter and smarter as if they do become popular there are ways in which agents could manipulate data to appear more often.

They need to get the layout of search results cleaner and more organised but on the whole a good first effort. Using whereis.com.au may bite them a little as I would have chosen Google, Yahoo or MSN maps.

They have clearly tried to copy Google with their search results and this is a good thing, but it just needs a little more refinement. I would be interested to see how they crawl individual agents sites as many are formatted differently and this is where they can do quite well if they got it right.

You can add your agency for inclusion or pay for a rapid inclusion. Your thoughts?