Recently at the Real Estate Connect San Francisco show I had the pleasure of catching up with Simon Baker from www.listglobally.com (amongst other ventures) and had a chat with him about his new global listing service. Simon seemed very upbeat about www.listglobally.com which allows real estate agents to list properties for sale across the leading websites gloabally – hence the name list globally.
The Video
ListGlobally.com Simon Baker from Peter Ricci on Vimeo.
Overview
There is a little more to this product that warrants more than just a first glance. The software allows any agency to list properties for sale on www.listglobally.com for a fee of $90 per listing for 90 days Listglobally.com then feeds (pushes) those listings to many of the most popular real estate websites in the world automatically including Canada, Germany, Great Britain, Japan, Russia, South Africa, Spain, United Arab Emirates, with many more in the pipeline.
Here are some of the websites that www.listglobally.com pushes to:
- rightmove.co.uk (United Kingdom)
- immobilienscout24.de (German)
- enormo.com (World)
- realestate.co.jp (Japan)
- iproperty.com.my (Malaysia)
- iproperty.com.sg (Singapore)
- propertyfinder.ae (United Arab Emirates)
- canadahomeguide.tv (Canada)
- gohome.com.hk (Hong Kong)
- 99acres.com (India)
The software looks to be very clean and efficient, the website looks the same, only information needed is presented and I like this approach. if you wish to join you have two options for adding your listings, you can join for free and then add each listing manually or you can feed your listings (talk to your IT people) to listglobally.com and then login and select which listings you want to activate for a fee of $90 per listing for 90 days. Most of these sites are the most popular in their country and the global ones like Enormo.com (which is really the only international portal available) should give your listings some decent exposure.
Listglobally.com have a number of country specific sites that have actually added on an “International section” for your listings to appear on and I understand in some cases listglobally.com have actually built in some of these international sections for portals.
If there is an inherent weakness in the product, it is this – I have real doubts that anyone would go to a site like realestate.com.au to search for listings in Japan , UK, India etc. If you were a serious buyer, you would seek out sites that had all the listings for that country. So just keep in mind that the figures quoted (around 40 million eyeballs) are actually not very accurate as far as the sections of the portals we are talking about with Enormo being the only true global website. Realestate.com.au may get 5 million visitors per month, however the International section may only get a few hundred thousand – so just keep this in mind.
As for the cost, $90 per listing for 90 days does sound pretty cheap but if you are going to market your whole portfolio, this can get quite expensive (10 x = $900, 100 times = $9,000), I am never a fan of time-limited fees, I would hate to see a realestate.com.au or domain.com.au do this in Australia although it will only be a matter of time before agents are charged per listing as more and more agents become mobile and offices begin declining in numbers (and they will).
All in all Listglobally.com should be a decent offering, but it will take time a few years to mature. At the moment the offering is fairly limited and probably will only be used by agents to attract more vendors,as with anything, the longevity of products like this does come down to the value it provides real estate agents.
I suggest you give it a go with one or two listings, you can jump right in now and give it a run with a property or three!
Simon is a pretty astute fellow and his reputation alone will get him off to a decent start in the market, long term – if they stick at it – I expect Listglobally.com to be a winner!
As a note for disclosure I am a shareholder in www.zooproperty.com which in some small way competes with Listglobally.com, although on a different level.
On Thursday evening I had a phone hookup with 
