Google Real Estate One Year On – Some Results
July 11, 2010 by Simon Baker
It has been a year since Google entered the Australian real estate market with the launch of listings on Google Maps. In that time there has been much conjecture on whether real esate on Google Maps would be successful. Most of this conjecture has been hopeful or experiential rather than fact based. One analyst recently even went as far as downgrading their recommendation on the REA Group to a sell based on the potential impact of Google.
While facts are hard to come by and the Google team are relatively secretive as to the performance of real estate on Google Maps, we now have some facts to look at the impact of Google Maps on a mid-sized property portal in Australia.
I recently spent some time with one of the customers of the recently launched Nestoria Australia who also have all their listings on Google Maps.
The results of this discussion show that Nestoria Australia and Google Maps are performing equally as well in driving traffic to the portal. Given that Nestoria Australia is barely 4 months old, it could be concluded that Google hasn’t changed the Australian property portal landscape; in fact it has barely scratched the surface.
Here are the results for percentage of total traffic to the mid-sized portal from each source for May and June this year.
| Source |
May |
June |
| Nestoria Australia |
4.91% |
5.18% |
| Google Maps |
4.56% |
5.29% |
What is also interesting is looking at the performance of customers sourced from both sources. Visitors from Google Maps had a slightly higher number of pages per visit with 3.09 pages versus 2.64 for visitors from Nestoria Australia. The bounce rate for visitors from Google Maps was 61% – slightly higher than for visitors from Nestoria Australia who had a 59% bounce rate.
So what can we conclude from this?
Firstly, real estate listings on Google Maps hasn’t changed the world as many predicted (hoped). At best, it has become another source of traffic for this midsized portal site. Given the traffic is free this is good news for them.
Secondly, real estate on Google Maps is either hard to find or does not have a compelling interface for visitors. Unfortunatley we dont have enough information to make a fact based conclusion on this. However, thinking about this logically, more people would be finding Google Maps than Nestoria Austalia (given it is 4 months old) and therefore we can probably conclude that the map based searching approach used by Google or the use of a property details page, is not providing a strong number of click throughs to the original advertisers site. (And also unlikely to be generating a strong number of leads due to the relative lack of contact details on the property details page.)
Finally, Nestoria Australia has done a good job in the last 4 months coming from a standing start to generating comparable click throughs with real estate on Google maps.
Disclaimer: Classified Ad Ventures, the publisher of Property Portal Watch, is a joint venture partner with Lokku (UK) in Nestoria Australia.
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I guess if both these sites are free it really doesnt matter.
Got to conclude google is probably better off focusing on the core rather than rushing off into verticals that need industry knowledge and expertise,rather than a slick algoritihm
Shouldn’t we be comparing apples with apples? Google Real estate is free for agents and portals to upload their listings, which in turn provides traffic to their site. Nestoria on the other hand is a pay per click / lead model like Google Ad Words, so I’m not sure free versus paid traffic should be treated equal???
This site is especially interesting since you write about portals across all countries rather than focus in the U.S. What Google is doing in Australia is a hint to what is to come in the U.S. Based on the results so far, I imagine they will change their strategy for their U.S. full launch of Google Real Estate. There strategy so far has been typical of a Google project: launch a limited scope and watch for acceptance or declination before increasing the scope.
It will be interesting to see the effects on the UK market. It must be remembered that Google simply provide property adverts (at the moment) and while Landlords are happy to have their property on Google Maps, their main concern will be getting enough prospective Tenants to view their property.
At present the larger UK property portals such as rightmove have significantly larger prospective Tenants registered for alerts than Google (at the moment). Furthermore, there’s more to letting or selling a property than pure advertising.
There are some property websites pulling together all this advertising as well as offering other services needed to let or sell a property.
Steve,
I can see your point, but some portals are are overwhelming the viewer with data simply to justify their subscription costs. In these cases the buyer finds it difficult to easily scroll through for the reason they came to the site in the first place ie view a sample of properties in their area of choice and contact a “person” to elaborate further.
Aren’t you kidding yourself to think that an advertising medium can offer other services to “effect” a sale. It’s the advertisers role to assist to provide leads and the agent/consultant to close the deal.
A fundamental rule of marketing and selling of real estate.
With both sites providing over 10% of traffic to your mid-sized portal, I’d say that is not insignificant – plus all the other traffic Google will provide from SEO and Adwords …; I’ve always thought game changers (such the internet) happen slowly. Look back 10 years and how much traffic to realestate sites was there? How much enquiry was driven from the net? How much now? It wouldn’t take much for Google to switch their real estate mapping search to the more mainstream search results (as they have for Google Local) and that could absolutely be a game changer.
Too early to tell based on Year One – sure – but anyone who has discounted Google has not lasted long. Anyone who’s taken them on, has rarely got off the canvas. We’ll see – it’s a long race, not a sprint.
Charlie
Thanks for the thoughts on google.
I think the threat of google depends on where you are in the portal race. If you are a market leader and have spent the last 10 years building a brand (e.g. realestate.com.au, rightmove.co.uk etc), then the potential impact of google on your business is much less than those mid-sized businesses who rely alot on google for traffic.
I agree that you shouldnt take your eye off of google, however, at the same time, i wouldnt become fixated with them.
Simon Baker