Google Real Estate – Thoughts from Property Portal Watch Workshop

Last week we wrote about the effectiveness of Google Maps and Nestoria Australia in driving traffic to a mid-sized Australian property portal. The facts showed that both sites were equally effective and drove between 5% and 6% of traffic to the site.

At the Property Portal Watch Workshop held in San Francisco last week, the 70 attendees discussed at length the potential impact of Google Maps on property portals around the world. We discussed anecdotally the impact of Google Maps on portals around the world.

Alistair Helm, the CEO of realestate.co.nz in New Zealand, revealed that Google drives around 64% of the overall traffic to realestate.co.nz.  However, Google Maps drives only 5.5% of the traffic to his site and this traffic is split across Google Maps in the US, UK, Australia and New Zealand.

The attendees also discussed the following:

• To date, real estate on Google Maps has not had any real impact beyond hype and conjecture.  None of the portals attending reported any decrease in traffic through lost of UV’s or any significant increase in traffic from advertising their listings on Google maps.
• Most agreed that the implementation of real estate on Google Maps is not as user friendly as it could be and that a list based approach seems to be more user friendly at this point in time.
• Until Google integrates the results of real estate on Google Maps into its main search, they are unlikely to drive significant traffic to advertisers.
• In some markets in Asia, Google is not the dominant search engine and therefore seen as less of a threat.
• Most portals reported that they see Google as a potential threat, mainly because they are not sure what Google’s real intentions are.  Everyone appears to be maintaining a cautious watching brief on Google.
• The group conjectured that Google may be on the path to dis-intermediating not only property portals but also the real estate agent.  One potential theory was posed was that over time Google wants consumers to pay to advertise on Google Maps and the use of real estate on Google Maps is just the first stepping stone to achieving this end.
• There are differing views amongst the portals as to whether they should engage or avoid Google.

Suffice to say, Google will continue to remain a hot topic of discussion amongst property portals.

It would be good to hear the thoughts of the readers out there as to the true potential impact of Google on the property portal industry.

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