realestate.com.au Updates Website and Search
June 19, 2009 by Alice Allan
Australian market leader realestate.com.au has upgraded and says more changes are planned for the next twelve months. The changes come after a string of upgrades at Australia’s number two property portal, domain.com.au.
An email sent to agents from realestate.com.au said future upgrades will be “focused on driving more buyers and sellers to your business and listings”. The email also outlined some of the changes that have already been made:
- Cleaner home page and site design: The realestate.com.au site has been refreshed to give it a cleaner look and feel.
- Improved navigation: The navigation menu has been simplified to drive more people to search your OFI and Auction times
- New page layout for OFI and Auction Times (beta): The new page layout appears in a list format, making it even easier for potential buyers and sellers to see all the upcoming OFI’s and Auctions in their selected suburbs.
- New ‘view results by inspection times’ (beta): The search results page can now be easily filtered by OFI time – property seekers can quickly sort the search results page to order the listings by the date and time of the next Open for Inspection.
realestate.com.au’s June newsletter also details the new search by open for inspection and auction times function, which allows users to create a shortlist of properties they wish to view.
The changes at realestate.com.au come after Australia’s number two player, domain.com.au, revamped its Home Alerts email service and launched a new “sold” section in May this year. domain.com.au also unveiled new search functionality and a new agent reported data platform in March, which was followed up with further improvements to its search in April.
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Hot on the heels of releasing a new online rentals application system in conjunction with 1form.com.au, domain.com.au has released an iPhone app....
- Three More Updates at domain.com.au
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- domain.com.au Launches Inspection Planner
Australian property portal domain.com.au has launched a new "Inspection Planner" that allows house hunters to plan their viewing schedules online. ...
- realestate.co.nz Open Home Service
New Zealand property portal realestate.co.nz has added a new open home service functionality to its website. ...
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The share market certainly liked the announcement of the upgrades to realestate.com.au, some good management of relationships with analysts employed it seems.
But I cannot help but wonder if the reaction has been overstated.
1. The ‘refreshed’ clean look, appears to be employing a style which propertyfinder.com and casa.it have employed (to a degree) since late 2007.
There are certainly some very cool SEO design elements in the new refreshed site, designed to not deter site users, but still meet all the algorithmic needs of Google, and the other search giants.
But the question to ask is, why has it taken this long, for REA to deploy a design on realestate.com.au which has been employed on their other sites?
2. The Search by Open For Inspection times – this is a nice clean mapping, and display execution of existing data.
But, if a consumer saves the listings to their list of favourites, the OFI’s do not appear in order (as in Day, Time) of when they occur. Instead they appear through the default setting of feature properties. Worse for consumers, is that they cannot sort the listings, then print them off, in the order of when they occur. So really, apart from using their database in order to display listings in a different way, there is no real usable take-away benefit to consumers, as they still have to manually print out the properties and collate in the order of time.
Homehound.com.au have just released their own OFI tool – which goes much further in making it simple for consumers to get information about OFI’s, when they occur and actually get them there.
Through homehound, consumers can easily get the OFI information into their own calendar, with all the information they need. This is a very good initiative, as from the one visit to the website, consumers can find the properties they like, get more information, and get a calendar note in their computer/phone to attend the OFI or Auction.
3. As reported earlier on PPW, domain have launched online tenancy applications.
By their very nature, the online tenancy application forms put consumers in direct and effective contact with an agent. For renters and agents, this is a great piece of functionality – which places domain as the leader in the rental/lease category.
4. Domain has just released their iPhone solution, which from my early usage, appears to have better functionality for consumers than the REA version. Having said that, the REA iphone application was really a copy of the PropertyFinder.com solution, so no real innovation for REA.
So whilst the latest offerings from REA are a very welcome improvement from their former presence, they appear to be falling behind their competitors in delivering applications and functionality which makes the property search process easier, and further, puts consumers in contact with agents and properties in a meaningful and expedient manner.
The potential risk for REA, is not keeping up with the developments of their competitors, and in doing so start to lose consumer loyalty to domain and homehound. Where the consumers go, so will the agents.