Google Trends has allowed users to compare the the number of searches for specific keywords. You could compare how popular searches for “Sydney Real Estate For Sale” compared against “Sydney Property For Sale”. Just recently Google has added the ability to compare actual visitors to specific sites. Your site has to produced significant traffic to appear on their radar so virtually all individual agent websites don’t produce the traffic to show, but lots of sites do as per the examples.

These are some graphs I have created using the tool. The graphs speak for themselves but there are a couple of things worth specifically noting. Look at MyHome since the money got turned off. Shane definitely has some work ahead of him just to return it to is previous traffic levels.

Also, have a look at the domain and REA comparison. REA really lost ground very late 2007 however they bounced back. I remember commenting on this at the time but have never revisited it. In recent months, REA looks to be more effected by the slowdown in the industry although this could just be the resolution of the graph too.

I could not help put in the trading post versus ebay graph given my recent post on Sensis. How they think they can compare their numbers is crazy. Interesting to see that whitepages and yellowpages traffic is down substantially over the past year.

Anyway.. on to the graphs (please note.. if you want to have a play yourself to get the actual traffic numbers you have to have an account or else you get the trend lines only, I think)

I shrinked the graphs so they appear on the web page better but have linked them to our image host so you can view the slightly larger versions yourself or you could even visit Google Trends and run your own report at Google Trends.

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In a never say die attitude Sensis are changing their online strategy again. Late last year they virtually abandoned their justlisted.com.au site and made it a simple doorway site to Domain’s data but now they want www.tradingpost.com.au to change to an auction system and take on the mighty ebay.

Sensis bought www.tradingpost.com.au in 2004 for a massive $636 million dollars and the business has been sliding back on them since then.

Some pretty big claims have been coming out of Sensis lately, including one that states “2 million people” already use www.tradingpost.com.au each month. Sensis were trying to hold this up against ebay’s 5 million account holders to show that they might gain traction in online auctions.

Now that has to be PR spin plain and simple. After reading this I quickly surveyed the next 20 people I met and not one person had visited www.tradingpost.com.au within the past several months and most have never visited it at all. Read the rest of this article »

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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?”

Read the rest of this article »

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There is one major player in the online space that has been pretty much silent over the past three years and that is Sensis with their Justlisted.com.au portal. Just Listed currently only plays in New South Wales but this time 3 years ago the then CEO heralded a national play within months and since then we have seen nothing. This was around the time that Just Listed launched a failed newspaper property guide. The Just Listed site is a dud by anyone’s calculations but they are backed by a company who has deep pockets and surely they cannot sit back and lose the most valuable online classifieds asset in (being real estate) for too much longer.

So what could they do? First thing they would need to do is make a purchase and this is what PBL should have done. The best purchase around Australia at the moment is Portplus which is rumoured to have around 1300 agents on their books. This would put Port Plus in the 10-15 million dollar mark if history is to judge on past purchases (property.com.au, hub online, commercialrealestate).

Remember Just Listed is a free site so any purchase would not include a jump in fees for agents in fact they would reap the benefits of a system for exporting (annual fees) and also the knowledge behind these systems. This company could then easily build a national portal (please start again) as they have done so in the past. There are other purchases out there such as Rockend or ReNet (which is pretty big) in which both have excellent technologies but I would think that like my company they would not be big enough (although Rockend is bigger than my little company and ReNet bigger still).

So I wonder what Sensis is up to as they have been terribly quiet of late in the online classifieds space.

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Ok,I have downloaded and used Google Earth now for about 4 weeks, I actually had the first version but Australia was pretty poorly covered. However I can now pinpoint my street and also my house in Bondi Beach Sydney. I can also see my sisters house and my parents/friends houses.

Not only this I can actually tag this information for other people to see. It really is a developers dream. Developers we will be able to tag information by simple viewing a property and inputting the co-ordinates. Hook into the Google Earth communication server and draw a series of maps from a variety of distances so that the home buyer can view the property location.

I have already employed a developer to do something like this. This is so much more useful and let alone fun for people than other offerings such as Whereis.com.au where if I wanted to this this I would need to pay money to the company for pretty much useless information. It may work for cars but whereis.com.au and other offerings are pretty uselss for web users.

THE IMAGE BELOW SHOWS MY HOUSE LOCATION (zoomed) AND A LARGER FIELD VIEW

Yes Google Earth is the real deal and it is going to have some severe ramifications for the Sensis owned www.whereis.com.au. This is becuase developers can get access to the system and use it for free on their websites.

I will report on this at a later date when I can provide you all with a demonstration.

Note: Link no longer exists.

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