Australian Residential Real Estate Market

The Australian residential real estate market has been extremely active over the last 3 – 4 years.

Transactions

The Australian residential real estate market has around 750,000 transaction each year. 

Agents and Agencies

There are around 30,000 residential real estate agents in Australia who work for around 9,000 real estate offices.

In Australia, it is the real estate office, not the agent, that has the prime brand in a market.

Of these offices, around 50% are independently operated while the other 50% are members of franchise groups.  The large franchise groups include Ray White, LJ Hooker, Raine & Horne, and Century 21.

Sales Model

In Australia, a vendor will approach a real estate office to sell their property.  The real estate office will propose either a 3% commission and will handle all marketing costs (around 60% of sales in the country) or will propose a ~2% commission and will charge the vendor a marketing fee of approximately 1% of the estimated sale price.

There is a high use of auctions in Australia to sell homes.

There are almost no buyers agents in Australia with buyers dealing directly with the selling agent to negotiate the final sales price.  If a buyers agent is used, this is almost always paid for by the buyer and not the vendor.

Advertising Model

There is a strong focus on newspaper advertising in Australia.  This is driven by the wide use, especially in the premium property areas, of vendor paid advertising.  That is, the vendor will pay for the advertising of the property separately from the commission they pay on the sale of the property.

It is estimated that the total advertising market in Australia is A$1.2 billion p.a. split roughly as:

• $820m on news paper advertising
• $180m on online advertising
• $200m on sign board, window cards, direct mail etc

There has been a progressive shift to online with areas such as share accommodation, rentals and low end properties disappearing from newspapers.

The major newspaper publishers are News Limited (part of New Corporation) and Fairfax

1. Australian Online Residential Property Ad Market

   The Australian online residential real estate market is dominated by one player - realestate.com.au. Since 2000, realestate.com.au has been the most popular site in the country with domain.com.au consistently in second place. This posting provides an overview of the Australian market including an estimate of the size of the market as well as an overview of the top players. Read on for more ... ...

2. Real Estate Added to Google Maps – What it Means for Australian Property Portals

   In Australia and the US, Google has added properties for sale to its mapping site – maps.google.com. Users of Google Maps are now able to see a selection of homes for sale and rent plotted on the maps. These homes for sale seem to be sourced from Google Base – Google’s classifieds engine. It is free for anyone to upload a listing and this can be done through an online interface or through an XML data feed. The inclusion of property listings from Google Base onto Google Maps has some parts of the Australia real estate world abuzz with thoughts of the end of market leaders’ realestate.com.au and domain.com.au. However, while this launch is new and innovative in the Australian market, a lot has to fall in place before realestate.com.au and domain.com.au are truly affected by the “entry” of Google into the Australian real estate advertising scene....

3. Italian Online Real Estate Market

   The online property portal market in Italy is clearly lead by two major players, casa.it and the Immobiliare network, competing closely for the first spot. ...

4. Nicaraguan Online Real Estate Market

   This is a guest post from Claudia Gonella, co-founder of Reveal Real Estate. She writes regularly on the state of the Nicaragua real estate market....

5. German Online Real Estate Market

   The online property portal market in Germany is dominated by three major players. Clear leader in terms of usage and number of listings is Immobilienscout24. ...