With PBL (think Kerry Packer) selling their shares in realestate.com.au one wonders their next move. That is if they still want to be involved in Internet real estate classifieds.
I think they do as they have shareholdings in Seek (jobs) and their Carpoint (cars) and all they need is real estate to participate in all “rivers of Gold” classifieds.
The big question is what if anything is out there? Realestate.com.au has all but shored up the online real estate portal market and there really isn’t any else of significance out there.
Things may change with the easing of cross media ownership laws but as it stands they will either have to start something from scratch which will take years to build up.
My guess is they will wait for something to emerge from the market and invest like they have done with Seek which pretty much has the same share of the online jobs classified market as realestate.com.au share in the real estate market.
Yes, realestate.com.au are the kings of real estate in Australia and it will not be too difficult for them to control the New Zealand market (this will take at least 3 years and plenty of freebies to build market share). But this is only the first round of the war and new technologies will emerge.
But for the next few years they will rule the real estate marketplace. It is companies like PBL that may come in from the dark sooner rather than later that could upset the trend.
