My arrival in Bondi Beach a year later was greeted with phone books stacked outside of my apartment block only to see weeks later the stack still standing, until eventually they were tossed in the bin. Today the splurge of these books in multiple formats continues to amaze me.

Now in the USA, San Francisco may be the first city to make a move to ban these books altogether. Let’s examine their reasoning. According to greenbiz.com local councils across the USA spend approximately $54 million a year to dispose of the books and another $9 million to recycle them. If this is true then their is not only an environmental reason but also an economical reason and when you combine these two you know action will eventually be taken.

In Australia there is a powerful lobby behind keeping unsolicited mail running with the usual line about how they are the lifeblood of small businesses, however with enough notice I am sure they can find better ways to get their message out and local online directories seem to an area that could cover this.

I have also spoken about how digital television could also reshape the advertising markets with local TV ads being delivered for specific area making it very affordable and another reason why James Packer is a thicky for getting rid of his interests in Nine.

The Yellow Pages in the USA have an opt out website where you can opt out of receiving them. I tried this in Australia and it took forever on a phone to finally opt out, yet I still kept receiving them – hardly self regulation at its best.

According to statistics “nearly 70% of adults in the United States ‘rarely or never’ use the phone book, and instead opt to use the Web-based search tools. I would guess the stats would be nearly exactly the same in Australia.

So now we have three very big reasons why the Yellow Pages cannot survive. Environmental and Economical for both the governments associated with real costs and businesses who are moving away from advertising in droves. Yellow Pages staff have posted some information here that cannot be backed up by any facts and figures, I am sure they have done their own internal polling of usage, and I am equally sure that will never see the light of day. Their big problem is they were slow to move in on the online world and now they are not even remotely as successful online as they should be. So they will cling to the past in the hope that they can wring some more dollars out of the few businesses that still enjoy some success from their services.

I can assure you a ban will not be effective for one company, that would not be fair, but unsolicited mail of any kind is on life support systems and agents are going to have to find better and more innovative ways to get their messages across.

If you are into mass mail marketing or letterbox drops, my opinion is that you should start now. Create a local market report that gets sent out to your local community and trial it for one year, where all in the community can read the report, go online and register to receive the same by electronic means. Annually you should also create a report across the board with a years worth of stats that looks cool, has a calendar attached and can be stuck on a fridge.

Subtle marketing works so much better than most of the in your face ‘I am awesome’ trash anyway.

Property Partner launches, then other people them know that you are in our community to meet a potential property partner (to purchase a property together).Users can then identify the qualities they want in a property partner and find a match by searching the network and then connect with these people.

Are people ready to jump in with relative strangers on the biggest purchase of their lives?

Yellow Pages Car Edition
Great to see innovation at Yellow Pages Labs (Yellow Labs Innovation!!!!), more editions, this time one for your car, yes a mini Yellow pages Car Edition. As we all know, there is nothing worse than driving along a busy highway and needing a plumber and not having any tool or resource for finding one. That is unless you do not have a mobile phone or satellite navigation. Keep an eye out for a push bike, plane, toilet, and tombstone version in the works.

Time to try some Air
Thats right have some Air. I challenge you to download and try one Adobe Air Application. There are many cool little apps, whether it is a tasks manager. These install and sit on your desktop.

Watch a TED Movie online.
TED, is without doubt one of the greatest websites in the world. Forget about seminars where you have to listen to someone tell you how ‘great you can be’, how you can make bucket loads of money by ‘smiling a certain way’ or from some &%#@er who never did anything but make money from telling other people how to make money. Get some inspiration from real people with unique lifestyles, ideas and visions. Head to TED!

Contribute to Business2.com.au
Yes, we would love to have some new writers contributing to our website. We want diversity, so if you have something to say about real estate that can benefit real estate agents, then we would love to hear from you. Our packages are very attractive, no salary, no super and a rock solid guarantee that you will be abused at some stage! Call Peter on 0438 391 397.

Well what a year it has been, with just about every major company in the real estate and classifieds market vying for entry into this years awards.

So how do you make our dumb and dumber awards? Well quite simply, you make a schoolboy mistake, try to cover something up or worse still knowingly do something that is so obviously dumb to everyone else aside from your inner sanctum.

So here is our list for this year, enjoy!

1. WINNER – REA Group – Realestate.com.au

What do you do when one of your email servers have hundred’s of thousands’s of property email enquiries stuck and not delivered for months and months on end to real estate agents battling through tough times? Well for starters some bright spark decided we will just deliver them to agents who had no clue of the age of the emails! Once the story broke here on business2.com.au REA then went into damage control and placed a note in agent admin and then later sent out an email explaining the situation to unsuspecting agents. This left agents embarrassed – their reputations tarnished and having to apologise to ten’s of thousand’s of enquirers.

REA offered a heartfelt apology, discussed compensation, but decided to just weather the storm and continue business as usual. REA’s reputation for care has never been worse and will take a hell of a lot of work to win back agents trust. More price rises to come will not help their cause. Fluffy promotional emails will not do anything either, hard work, improved customer service and some humility will help.

2. RUNNER UP – PBL & Microsoft

Get a photo op with a bunch of Steve Jobs wannabes on launch, spend ten’s of millions of dollars marketing a website with out-of-date and sold listings, less than 30% of your rivals listings (and the same data), do buddy deals with a handful of the major franchise groups along with the worst real estate interface to come out of the 21st century and what do you get? Well you get them running scared and selling it off in 12 months for less than 3% of what they put into it. Still it has to be one of his better deals since he took over from daddy. If you want to know how NOT to build and launch a real estate portal, note the myhome.com.au debacle. The new owners are trying their best and have really got back to basics. May be worth the try now!

3. Major Telcos

Put together pathetic customers service, disgraceful data plans, slow networks and you have yourself a major Telco. Telstra may have the best wireless Internet in Australia, but it has the most expensive – restrictive plans around and Optus is not much better. It pays big time to look around. Maybe Telstra should spend some time and money on the people that make them money rather than trying to protect their monopoly. Optus does not fare much better and you only have to look into the Whirpool forums to see how many people loath their Telcos.

4. The Financial Meltdown

Oh, how we were once impressed by our finance market friends driving their Maserati’s and Porsches, how we listened to their amazing insights into how the money markets worked, how impressed we were about how they speculate and how their models make everyone rich and successful. Turns out they were all pretty much clueless, having fancy degrees on a wall means nothing if you don’t have real world smarts. If making money is your only goal then you will eventually fail, problem is – this time around everyone suffered.

It is ok to strive for an open market economy, but should mum and dads around the world have to bail them out when it all goes pear-shaped?

5. Get it ‘FREE’ Mobile Domain

SMS property alerts on your mobile, great idea and absolutely free – well free as in 0.55 cents an SMS. Ooops sorry forgot to mention that! ACCC noted this and slapped Fairfax over the knuckles.

6. REA’s Peak Industry Body

Way way back in March 2007 (nearly 2 years ago, REA setup ‘The Peak Industry Body’, this was no doubt an effort to ‘connect’ with you, ‘Joe the Plumber’, meeting ‘at least’ 6 times a year would equate to around 24 meetings so far. I think each meeting ended with a Hollowmen ‘steady as she goes approach’ because unless I am mistaken nothing has ever come out of this – except continual price rises

7. Internet Explorer

To every single software/website or so called IT expert that only works in Internet Explorer or in the latter case only only allows you to use IE6, hang your heads in shame. Every time I use Internet Explorer I am frustrated, whether it is testing sites in IE6 or 7 and now IE8.

The latest debacle for Internet Explorer came just a few days ago.

The vulnerability could allow remote code execution if a user views a specially crafted Web page using Internet Explorer. Users whose accounts are configured to have fewer user rights on the system could be less impacted than users who operate with administrative user rights. This security update is rated Critical for Internet Explorer 5.01, Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 6 Service Pack 1, and Internet Explorer 7.

Basically anyone could access your PC and take anything they liked. Microsoft stated that it is always looking at ways to improve their product, no, they are always looking at ways to get it to at least work. One friend of mine lost $4,800 just yesterday and is scrambling to get it back because someone hacked their PC.

So free yourself from the train wreck of a browser which is Internet Explorer and jump with Firefox, Opera, Safari or Google Chrome and leave, buggy, slow, insecure software behind. If your software provider can’t cut it, then leave them behind as well.

Note: Also read some reviews on anti virus software and get it installed on all pc’s.

8. Why are we waiting?

Google needs to get its act together and release a solution that the whole market is waiting for. Every day I am asked the question and each day I have no answer. I know they are working on it – but come on guys and girls. Worldwide the advertisers market for a stand-alone real estate website from Google would be worth billions and billions of dollars of new advertising revenue.

9. Yellow Pages

Time to get a new advertising campaign, no one really cares about you any more and the campaigns warning us of impending financial gloom if we do not advertise with you just don’t cut it any more. Rising costs, hundreds of thousands of books dumped in rubbish bins or left rotting in the rain – and a business model that just plain sucks. And don’t get me started on Yellow Pages Online.

10. Newspapers

I love newspapers, I really do, they serve a great part of discussion in our community, but if you think articles about Nicole Kidman’s lips or Brad and Angelina are going to lift your readership think again. Newspapers need to rebuild their classifieds to suit a new market. Once upon a time agents pushed newspaper advertising for them, only a few do now and the market is getting smaller by the day. Keep this up and classified newspapers are finished. Simple test, get two people, one in a newspaper and one online to find a 3 bedroom 2 bathroom property in Wagga Wagga.

Solution?
1. Rebuild your classifieds for ease of use.
2. Offer annual subscriptions at a loss to build base readership – $10.
3. Get into real property journalism that gets people talking. (not paid for fluff promos)

11. New Real Estate Portals

So you want to help agents get away from REA and Domain? No you don’t, you want to make money and sell out to one or the other once you have some success. Oh and $10,000 you have committed does not build you a national portal – not even built off shore. So, stop telling me you care and how exciting your product is and do the hard yards, start local and build out, and your systems had better be good!

12. Kevin Rudd

Oh Kevin you had us all, you promised so much, you work long hours and impress us with grandiose words like ‘education revolution’. Here’s the thing, deep down inside you know you are boring, we do too, but we knew that already, we just want you to make a difference, we want some bold initiatives – not only for this industry but for Australia. In 2009 there is to be no more buck passing, no more ‘we are not immune’.

We didn’t know what cards you had, we thought it must have been good, 3 deuces in the hand? A straight? A full house? A flush? A straight flush? If we find out all you had was a piddly small pair – you will be out with the bathwater. So get down and dirty, make some bold reforms and get this country back on track.

13. Printed Local Property Guides

Every week about 24 local newspapers are dumped on our doorstep (we only have 12 apartments) and every week about 23 of them end up in the trash. You all thought it was a great idea to launch a property guide. How wrong it has all turned out to be. I will give you all less than 12 months. When vendors clearly say no to agents about advertising in local newspapers you know you are in trouble, my bet is that you will keep thinking you can turn it around.

14. Agent Websites

I spent a day trawling through agent websites randomly a few days ago. I looked at over 500 sites. Ouch, apart from seeing about 100 websites that are exactly the same (template sites), so many do not work in all major browsers. Here is a hint, if newspapers are no longer viable in this climate for marketing, where is your differentiator? Yes its your website! If you have a good one, then let every vendor know about it and ask them to compare. If you don’t – then you only have yourself to blame.

15. Vanity Blogging

Everyone is getting into blogging and you should be too. However steer clear of chest thumping and telling everyone how wonderful you and your company are – because no one is listening. Write about what you know and your opinions on the market, promote local businesses and get everyone involved. Welcome dissent, as long as it is not abusive or profane – promote it.

16. Vanity Boards

If agents need a pointer as to why some people think sign boards at the front of homes for sale and rent are more about the promoting real estate agents than the properties they are promoting then look no further than those ‘look at me boards’ promoting massive pictures of agents and in most cases nothing about the property. Ok, we get it, you absolutely love yourselves and it is cheaper than billboards but just let it go, the will to want to do it, should be enough of a sign that you have lost the plot.

17. Channels 7, 9,10

So you have your own little ratings system which bears no semblance to actual figures (good to keep that ad revenue coming in) however you are all finished unless you adapt. Showing old series just doesn’t cut it (a lot of people download the new series anyway), blatant chest thumping is so 1980′s and no innovation means a slow grinding death. Think about digital, get together, innovate with set top boxes supported by all and create a new market for direct localisation of ad serving.

18. Advertising Agencies

If you want to know who NOT to listen to when it comes to marketing your products or services just look at advertising agencies. I had a taste of them in the late 90′s and thought I would go through the process again, hoping they had learnt something about the Internet since then. I am not going to name the agencies, but if the group I met are any indication, stay well away, save your money and do it yourself!

19. James Packer

James oh James, what a business you inherited, tv networks, magazines, prime Internet locations, casinos and the list goes on. Here’s an idea, lets build a business our family empire will be proud of, lets dump just about everything we have built over the years and just get into gambling. What a noble business to be in and what a time to do it? We never cared to much about how rich you were, we liked Kerry, he was like one of us, we loved his stories (even if they were myths) and we liked you. If all you want to do is make money – then good luck to you – but you only have a few billion left buddy!

20. Mobile Agents Angst

So you have a local competitor that does not have an office (road warrior) – get over it. This is the 21st century and mobile agents working from home or on the road are going to be a lot more common over the coming years. If you use your office as a springboard to connect with vendors and buyers then you have nothing to worry about.

21. Real Estate Institutes

Can someone tell me what these organisations actually do?

A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all of our readers, see you all again in 2009!

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.

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.

Maybe they had 2 million visits, but I doubt they had 2 million visitors. Could you imagine how many visits ebay.com.au would have every single month to compare this against.

Fanciful claims coming out Sensis staff is nothing new though. In the past we have seen claims from a self confessed rank and file Sensis employee (that seemed like a PR person incognito) that Sensis was responsible for generating $61 billion of sales from just the Metro editions of the Yellow Pages. When challenged he offered some Doctor as proof of the figures hoping that might impress.. and then when challenged again admitted that he remembered it off some powerpoint slide he seen once and that meant of course that there was no proof, not one single shred of evidence to his claim.

(see http://www.business2.com.au/2007/07/22/yellow-pages-advertising-closing-soon/)

Of course that was a little hard to prove considering it represented nearly 10% of Australia’s GDP and thus meant $1 in every $10 spent in Australia was meant to have been generated through just a handful of Yellow Pages editions around Australia.

Sensis have released recently that they are working on an iPhone search application which is interesting as its parent company, Telsta has not confirmed it will even be handling the iPhone when it comes here, unlike Vodaphone and Optus who have both shouted out loud about their involvement.

Sensis was going to set the search world on fire but their attempt was just laughable. Google delivered us just a touch over 63,000 visits over the past 12 months. In that same time Sensis.com.au delivered… wait for it… 8.

Lets not forget the www.whitepages.com.au… that was actually responsible for another 8 visits. I get far more traffic in a week from people clicking on my name on this blog than I get from Sensis in a year.

Sensis have never impressed online and I cant see them turning it around and now they expect us to believe that they are to tackle the online auction space. Whats Next..? Maybe they might try and follow www.trademe.co.nz impessive example and take on real estate classifieds. Better watch out REA, their online pedigree is impressive!

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?”

TELSTRA
1. Has any one company spat the dummy so many times in the past 12 months? Good ol Sol knows a good monopoly when he has one and will do anything to maintain the status quo. Many developed Nations have real broadband and laugh at us whilst we still pay ‘line rental’ and have local and national call rates, we will continue to be held to ransom by Telstra until there is real competition. Telstra have tried in vein to make the public warm to them, however the majority of Australians have an immense dislike of the company after many years of being dictated to and so are eager to move on to other offerings such as Naked DSL . (No need for telephone lines here and free local and national phone calls including broadband for one monthly fee.)

2008 will be an absolute shocker for Telstra unless it can get what it wants.

FAIRFAX DIGITAL
1. Fairfax Digital are one of the most progressive technology companies in Australia. However even big boys forget to pay their bills. One overzealous accounts department person from Web Central decided to suspend the domain name www.commercialrealestate.com.au for non payment of an $88.00 invoice. The site was down for a number of days. Of course News Ltd Newspapers made the pain last longer with many articles on this most basic of blunders.

2. Websites go down, but Domain seems to be down more and more. The reason? Who knows, from my experience it comes down to too many developments slapped on top of other projects until something simple fails and brings the whole deck down. Let’s hope it is all behind them as it makes no difference to agents invoices and only costs them potential business.

3. Adore may have had a big launch and may have had some enthusiastic backers. However, it was just another website for chest thumpers and has been slowly whittled away to nothing more than an expensive exercise. Another example of an executives idea of making more money out of agents. If the data is the same that is on a main website with all the listings then consumers will simply not bother, no matter how pretty it is.

SENSIS
1. Justlisted.com.au noted as one of the worst real estate sites ever in Australia’s big business history went for a revamp early in the year. A notice was sent out that they would be closing over the New Year and performing maintenance on their website. Some 14 days later the website was up again resplendent with all of the changes you would expect from such a significant outage– Absolutely Zero.

2. Many wondered what the hell the people at Sensis were thinking when they built a website with, well, exactly the same information as that which is on Domain.com.au. Granted it is a nice little idea, but can someone tell me why I would visit a site to search for listings which just sends me to another website to view those listings when I could have just gone to the destination site in the first place?

3. Maybe they were scared because big boy PBL got it wrong, maybe they thought it was just too hard, but by giving up on Real Estate, Sensis has become a lightweight of the Internet. With so many other web based services that are successful you would think a slow building national real estate portal would be a feather in their cap. Instead we have – well I am still not sure what we have with Just Listed.

4. I still wonder why agents spend so much money on massive ads in the Yellow Pages, I really do not know anyone who uses the print directory any more. I am sure their are hundreds of thousands who still do, but the Yellow Pages print version is destined for oblivion. Well, I thought that was the case, until a Yellow Pages executive posted a comment to my article on business2 touting that the directory was responsible for $61 Billion worth of sales to advertisers in capital cities alone! Now that is around 1/20th of our GDP. If this was the case the directory would be filled to the brim with advertisers and would need to be delivered by forklift. Of course it was internal research. So how is this done? Well just grab a calculator and multiply heaps of numbers by heaps of numbers by heaps of numbers—Easy hey!

FEDERAL STATE & LOCAL GOVERNMENTS
1. As everyone tries to find a way to get first home buyers into the market, not one government, local, state or federal have put forward one initiative that will actually make a difference. Whilst we have governments either too scared to act or too dumb to know that the crisis will grow worse year by year until a time when agents will be selling properties only to the 20% of Australians who will be able to afford them and renting real estate to the rest.

2. Thanks to the relaxing of media ownership laws we now have the competition we all dreamed of, more newspapers, television stations, radio broadcasters and lower advertising rates. Wait….no we don’t! The big boys just keep buying up other big-but-not-so-big boys.

REA AUSTRALIA
1. Around this time last year many sites starting touting the benefits of mapping and a few sites added mapping or were about to hit the horizon with mapping solutions. The CEO of Real Estate.com.au Simon Baker was having none of this, so he quickly tried to discredit mapping (to a degree) by referring to some research completed in the USA which stated that “that 88% of respondents wanted multiple pictures and slide shows, 86% wanted virtual tours, and 84% wanted neighbourhood profiles. However only 43% indicated they wanted maps and directions and only 24% cared about online mortgages‘ thereby telling us that people did not want mapping and how this research aligned with REA’s own research. Result? REA added mapping solutions and now tout the benefits of their own mapping system over their competitors. REA took an each way bet and continued with the Google Maps and is now one of the largest mapping sites in the world, their own mapping systems have taken a back-seat to the Google Maps platform.

PETER RICCI
1. April 1st 2007. Google buys REA! One of the bloggers decided to spend a little time and create a page with a press release that Google had purchased REA. I tried to call someone from REA but did not get a response. So I did what any hacker journalist would do and put up a press release and waited. It didn’t take long before I was banged to right and forced to eat humble pie, much to the delight of many.

I even received a few direct emails telling me that I got what I deserved and that I should take a course in journalism to understand the checks and balances that these journalists go through for each story they publish and how bloggers were a blight on ‘journalistic integrity’. I ate my humble pie but kept those emails just for laughs, as I love how seriously some people take themselves!

REALSEARCH
1. Real Search, yes another ‘Google of Real Estate’ – decided to launch a site and promptly sent press releases everywhere and anywhere. The site basically mined other websites for property data and presented it without the authorisation of the sites it was mining. Result? Companies started sending legal notices from everywhere and anywhere and the site was taken down within days.

Real Search has now re-invented itself and wants to hug all independent real estate agencies and help them to play on a level playing field with franchises. Funny, I thought many well run independents actually did better than franchises. We now have a countdown for launch which I am sure has changed a couple of times and around three agents across Australia are closely monitoring.

HOME PRICING WEBSITES
1. I takes me hat off to all of those house pricing websites advertising on major real estate portals. These companies basically ‘help’ people by sending their details to any agent who is willing to pay money for their information. Heaven help us if any one of these sites becomes massively popular (which they will not, especially with this business model) as agents will eventually pay through the nose for these so called ‘leads’.

The day will come when we can rid ourselves of these junk sites and concentrate on real information and real benefits for real estate agents. I am sure the real estate portals are working on their own solutions but don’t hold your breath as I am also sure that they will have some pretty juicy pricing models for themselves.

NEW REAL ESTATE PORTALS
1. This is a collective award to all of the new ‘Google of Real Estate’ portals that launched in 2007, the result being that none of them have made a difference. One day someone will release a portal, get it right and slowly build a market share without spending any money telling people about it until they get that market share. Out of all the new sites, only MyHome has a chance at this stage but they will need a brain transplant if they are ever to challenge the big boys.

These real estate portals need to go back to school or concentrate on specific areas of real estate, such as land or waterfront listings. We need something fresh and we need something that all real estate agents will embrace. Free is not free if it requires work from agents or their developers. Cheap means absolutely zero if agents do not get genuine leads.

PROPERTY GUIDES – MAGAZINES
1. Yes some of these are gorgeous to look at, but a day will come when agents say, what are we spending our money on and where are we getting a return? The result is we have more and more magazines sitting on the streets, outside empty shops and more often than not, quickly ending up in rubbish bins.

Yes, there is a place for property guides, but these companies are going to face some big hurdles in the future if they continually just dump magazines on lawns, on top of letter boxes or deliver (in my case) double the amount of guides for the number of apartments. Agents more than ever understand that these are just marketing guides for their companies and really do not do much to sell properties.

VANITY YARD SIGNS
1. A message to all of those agents who charge vendors for yard signs and then place a life-size picture of themselves on that sign with very little real property information. Clever? Maybe, but I for one would ask one very simple question.

Am I paying for you to promote yourself or for you to promote my property? Vanity signage is becoming more and more commonplace. Having a sign that tells me “I will love this place” with a big picture of a smiling person and a whopping big logo may be cheaper to produce but they do nothing for the vendor.

I pine for the good old days where a sign told me how many bedrooms, livingrooms, bathrooms, car spaces and so on and gave me a little insight into what was actually on offer and I am sure many other buyers and potential tenants do also.

TV NETWORKS
1. Oh how the Internet is hurting advertising revenues! We now have every TV network advertising business luminaries such as Gerry Harvey and John Simmons with their ThinkTV campaigns. Yes TV is still powerful (albeit shrinking). They even have their very own model of ratings (just use that calculator again) and about 3% of Australian businesses that can afford to advertise on TV!

TV is on the decline and will not be able to survive in the long term unless it gives the consumer what they want, when they want it. The only hope I see is the streaming medium whereby businesses can have their TV ads appear in certain regions for a massively reduced price. But while eyeballs are moving onto the Internet and mobile phones, if all the TV networks can do is try to hold the fort – they will die a very slow death.

NEWSPAPERS
1. Get your DVD, CD’s, Magazines and Souvenir editions with any newspaper! Read about Jennifer, Brad, Brittany, Kylie and any celebrity scandal you can think of (just get a photo and make up a story). Try as they might to grab some ‘Generation Me’ they continue to fail, despite trying really, really hard. Perhaps keeping the loyal readers might be an idea for long term survival.

Newspapers need to do what they do best and that is pure journalism instead of trumped up headlines and smut peddling (we can get that elsewhere thanks). They have made some great inroads online and I am sure they have a few years left until of course they have to bite the bullet and become FREE!

CORPSES
Here we have a bank that really knows how to sell! Firstly they repossess a home and then put it on the market for auction. Now this is one feature the new owners definitely did not pay for – a complete mummified corpse of its former owner, who had stopped making mortgage payments six years earlier.

Apparently the body, was preserved by the salty air in the Spanish seaside town of Roses and was found by, you guessed it – the buyer!

More Fun 2007 Dumb and Dumber Lists
Fortune Magazine 101 Dumbest Moments in Business
Business2 (USA) 101 Dumbest Moments
Daily News 50 Dumbest People in Hollywood

Make sure you take out a bigger advertisement than your competitor. I am sure your local representative will let you know how big you must go.

If you really want to flex your marketing muscles take out a yellow pages online advertisement. I have a client that took out a premium online advertisement with Yellow Pages and I am happy to report they have received 37 link visits for the year (Source Google Analytics). Wow what value!

For those enlightened agents, lets see what you can get for the $10,000 you save by just taking out a little line advertisement in Yellow Pages instead of wasting your money on a big colourful advert that very few people looking to buy and sell real estate read.

* A Yearly Subscription to both Domain.com.au and MyHome or,
* 30,000 visitors to your website through a Google Adwords Campaign or,
* 3 of your Cars Fully Branded with an AutoSkin (yes my brother in law owns this company) or
* A Website Upgrade or
* $10,000 extra in your bank account!

So it pays to think about where you spend your marketing money these days. You want value for money and I am afraid (in my opinion) the Yellow Pages is just so yesterday.

I had a phone call today from Sensis and found the salesperson polite and very well drilled. However his biggest problem lies in the fact (my opinion again) that he does not have a product that is worth the investment. This is because more and more people direct their business searching online which relgegates the Yellow pages to a secondary force in advertising.

Yes I would say it is still of some value advertising in the current Yellow Pages Directory for real estate agents, but spending 10′s of thousands of dollars is simply chest thumping gone silly and it does not provide your agency with value for money – value that is increasingly found elsewhere!

Why is this? In my opinion (and you should ask family and friends) most people simply do not use the paper Yellow Pages Directory. You should conduct your own research but speaking with my family and friends I have found the directory rarely used, in fact we were all surprised at how they had not thought much about it, but nearly all of these people used Google or MSN to search.

Another problem faced by Yellow Pages is that every year their prices rise but readership goes down. This does not make sense, perhaps a drop in price is an admission of guilt! More and more people choose to go online to find what they are looking for with Google, Yahoo and MSN offering far better marketing solutions and an infinitely better bang for your buck.

The Sensis salesperson sensed he was fighting a losing battle trying to convince me to advertise in the Yellow Pages paper directory and in doing so turned to marketing the Yellow Pages Online directory.

He dutifully informed me that the Yellow Pages Online site receives over 3 million unique visitors per month, to which I replied, ‘yes, but you have over 1 million businesses advertising – which equates to an average of just 3 visitors per listing per month – yes that is only 36 per year’! You can argue all you like about semantics and how many page views each visitor gives the site – but I doubt it is very many – I also find the site terrible to use and I prefer white pages.

Another thing………..

Think about this, realestate.com.au and domain.com.au receive over 4 million unique visitors per month and each of these visitors is either looking to rent, buy or sell – this is called targeted marketing – that is, advertising where your market is.

So yes, advertise on Yellow Pages Online (basic package) and advertise in the paper version, (whatever makes you feel good) but scale it back and spend your money where your market is – online!

Please tell me what you think!

My views are clear on this…….expensive Yellow Pages Advertising is a complete and utter waste of money for real estate agents.

10 Years ago yes, you needed to advertise in the directory but lets face it, these days the vast majority of your market is online!

If you feel the need for some chest thumping and have plenty of cash to spread around then by all means go for it. If you have finally wised up just take a basic ad (still expensive).

If the salesperson from Yellow Pages tells how your competitor has gone for a quarter page, half page or full page ad, be happy in the knowledge that you can spend that money not wasted online promoting your website and not only get a much better response but for the first time in your life you will find you have the ability to measure its effectiveness.

Yellow Pages Salespeople run scare campaigns and yes there are certainly some industries that still need to advertise in the directory, but believe me you are not one of them!

Think about this how often do you use the Yellow Pages these days when you can do a search online?

I cannot remember the last time I actually used a Yellow or White Pages directory, it must be at least 3 years and I can tell you most of my friends do not use it either and some of them are not heavy Internet users.

Yellow Pages is a spent force and the sooner it rides into the Sunset the better.

So resist the urge, get a basic listing in the Yellow pages and spend the savings promoting your own website!

The Good
The sale of Telstra will free this company up to do what it needs to accomplish not only in Australia but more importantly in Asia. However this will be the supreme test of the leadership of Telstra and Ziggy will not be afforded the same mistakes (billion$) he has been afforded in the past. His hand back of large dividends to shareholders could come back to haunt him as Telstra will need all the resources it can muster to compete in new markets both here and overseas.

What Telstra has in its advantage is the ability to allow other companies to create new opportunities and then simply purchase a company for a high price and then offer it as a Telstra service.

We have seen a relentless assault on the classifieds market (including real estate classifieds) that have been dominated by News Limited, Fairfax and to a lesser extent Rural Press over the past 12 months with the acquisition of the Trading Post and its various assets.

This will continue unabated, the sale of Telstra will probably bring the Fairfax sale back into the picture and this will make Telstra a real threat to PBL and News Limited in this part of the world. The loosening of cross media ownership laws will also be a boon to Telstra in the TV and Pay TV markets.

Selling Telstra (whatever your opinion) is inevitable and it will be interesting to see whether the management can make the most of it.

The Bad.
The biggest threat moving forward to Telstra is from the wireless and VOIP markets.

Telstra will have to find new revenues as local and interstate phone call revenues will be diminished significantly within 3 years.

Telstra has known this for some time and that is why service charges such as line rental continue to rise. This is because at some stage they will have to give up their revenues for local and interstate calls.

Wireless and VOIP can become the biggest threat to the massive revenue base Telstra has from phone charges (including the high charges of SMS messaging).

This is because you do not need a phone line and add in free calls (worldwide) over broadband internet with anyone with similar software (you can do this now if you have broadband www.skype.com) can connect through VOIP. This is a simple process of two connecting people having the same software and a broadband connection.

Take my situation, I have 3 mobile phones, two regular lines and an unlimited broadband plan. My total annual costs are just over $6600.00 per annum. This is mainly made up of my FREE customer support line. If all my agents had broadband and the same Skype Software (microphone and speakers) my annual fees would be reduced by 75%. I would still have my broadband costs and line rental charges (about$1500 p.a.) which are always going down. Give me wireless broadband and I would not need my line rental and as broadband fees continue to drop I could see myself paying less than $500.00 per annum in less than two years. This will hurt Telstra immeasurably, but what needs to happen is for someone to come up with a wireless telephone handset that can be connected via broadband and a universal numbering system (still eluding us)

The Ugly.
What will more than likely happen is that Telstra will introduce these things first and with a massive marketing budget take the whole revenue base in one big bang. If the people of Australia embraced this (more than likely) then Telstra can protect their revenues. The success of this will come down to simplicity. If Telstra get it right they will own this market. Telstra will already be working on a strategy and will not give up current revenues until it is time to do so and this will only happen if mum and dads across Australia start t think seriously about this.

Unfortunately for all Australians this does not need to be this way, but as a matter of course it is always big business that controls what we do.

As a final note, much has been said about the success of this election for the Howard Coalition and the disappointment of the Latham led Labor Party.

However Mark Latham took over a party that had around 30% primary vote in polling and came up against a party that had a very good economic track record. Looking at this he has done quite well. The Democrats are becoming useless (shame) and the Greens continue to strengthen their share of the vote. The Family First Party has been a bright spot (wherever you sit religiously) and could continue their growth well into the next election (and beyond).

The Liberal Coalition won because Australians obviously care more about their pockets (and why not) more than social issues. Very few of us will give up on a business plan that works and this has been reflected in the vote.