Could you cancel your realestate.com.au and domain.com.au subscriptions in 2012? You would be forgiven for thinking real estate is all online these days it dominates the landscape that much and online the search engines are the first port of call for property related traffic. Just after leaving Simon Baker confirmed that even realestate.com.au received massive traffic, somewhere over 30% from Google which is just one search engine. Portals and particularly the top two paid portals absolutely saturate the search engine results by investing heavilly in SEO teams
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14
Sep
2011
Masters Nerang – Masters Home Improvement Store
The brand new $30 million dollar Masters Home Improvement store in Nerang is one of the first of 150 Masters stores in the country and 34 planned for Queensland. Masters Home Improvement is operated by a joint venture between Australian Retailer Woolworths Limited and U.S.
Read moreSpring is only days away and the busiest selling season is about to start so how can you find the best real estate agent in your area. The biggest mistake sellers make when hiring a Real Estate agent is that they do not do their homework before appointing their agent.
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11
Jul
2011
Project Rebellion: RPData in the Firing Line
As a followup to recent articles relating to the industry revolt and ACCC investigation into RealEstate.com.au, Australian Financial Review journalist Ben Hurley has released another article that takes aim at RPData and their valuation strategy . RPData have been working on a valuation system similar to US portal Zillow in the USA where they provide a valuation to consumers. Naturally this has upset real estate agents and valuers alike around the country
Read moreIn a followup article to the Front Page Project Rebellion article, Ben Hurley from the Australian Financial Review has published a new story on an ongoing investigation by the ACCC into the activities of RealEstate.com.au and to a lesser extent Domain.com.au . Questions directed at some of Australia’s leading real estate groups have seemed to focus on excessive price rises (see 1 , 2 , 3 and 4 ) of realestate.com.au and the effectiveness of competition in the real estate online classified space. Simon Baker, the ex CEO and substantial shareholder in REA has made some interesting comments on this blog recently regarding realestate.com.au prices : If the franchise groups were serious about competing with realestate.com.au or at least providing a competitive offering, wouldnt they first start internally and attempt to organise group buying of REA subscriptions for their franchisees? Imagine if all Ray White or LJ Hooker offices got together and negotiated as one for their REA subscriptions (and additional products)
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23
Jun
2011
Project Rebellion : Front Page News!
Over the past several weeks Ben Hurley from the Australian Financial Review has been conducting an investigation into the revolt by real estate agencies around the country against Realestate.com.au. Today on the front page of the Australian Financial Review Ben’s article “Real Estate Agents Revolt” appears.
Read moreIn what seems like remarkable timing, sitting in my email this morning was an invitation to partake in the Annual Customer Satisfaction Survey for realestate.com.au. Now is the time to let REA know what you think of them, the good and the bad. The email includes a comment “The survey questionnaire can be completed by personnel who have contact with realestate.com.au” which seems to infer that you can get anybody in your office to also submit on your survey link.
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10
Jun
2011
Realestate.com.au Backs Down From The Fight!
Realestate.com.au has always promoted itself as a portal for real estate agents but recently we have seen a surge in real estate agents using technology to operate from a digital storefront and list their properties on the portal. At first many of these websites were not run by real estate agents but REA quickly enforced this rule.
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