In the past I’ve overheard real estate agents talking on the phone, directing clients onto the major portals like realestate.com.au & domain.com.au to help a client find out more information about a property. I could never understand why the agent wouldn’t want to send the customers to the listing appearing on their own company website??? Read the rest of this article »

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Twitter is taking the Australian real estate industry by storm at the moment and I have to apologise about another post on the topic in such short time, but I think this is very important. Whilst its potential to do good is huge like most powerful web applications it has a dark side just waiting to come out and bite you for the wrong reasons. Social networking and the internet in general has allowed a voice for everyone including your biggest critics.

I searched all major real estate groups on twitter to see what they are doing on Twitter and two things really stood out.

LJ Hooker is getting really hammered on twitter right now. As at 8:48pm tonight , the 27th of May, searching “LJ Hooker” on Twitter (http://search.twitter.com) provides a total of 16 results. One of these had no relationship with LJ Hooker Real Estate and four where by LJ Hooker offices themselves. That leaves 11 posts by third parties nad 6 of those were negative damning comments. That’s more than 50%.. hell that’s still nearly 40% of all posts returned being negative. That’s got to ring alarm bells for somebody at LJ Hooker HQ. It may turn out to be an anomaly but they need to monitor it to find out.

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Twitter promotes itself as a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

However, ingenious people are finding a mass of different uses for Twitter. We are even building this into our new property platform Zoo Property, so that agents can automatically notify followers of new listings, price changes etc.

I am sure other platforms will do similar things and that’s the beauty of technology, there are a million uses for even what at first seems like a pointless tool and sometimes the company that makes these tools, do not even know what they will be uses for.

Even Google Maps did not even think about what people may do with mashing up the data and now there are millions of websites using mapping in so many unique ways.

Here is an other excellent Ted Talk from Evan Williams

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