findrealty.com.au Up For Sale

Australian property portal findrealty.com.au is up for sale.
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homesaledirectory.com Partners With realtytrac.com

homesaledirectory.com, one of the leading home for sale listing websites for buyers and sellers in the US, has announced a partnership that will see realtytrac.com powering a nationwide foreclosure home search on homesaledirectory.com.

“In an effort to continually provide our customers with the most comprehensive real estate listing data available we are pleased to announce this new alliance with realtytrac.com,” said Jason Dittberner, president of homesaledirectory.com. “Home buyers and investors are searching for the best buying opportunities available and this partnership adds yet another valuable resource that homesaledirectory.com can provide to our clients.”

The foreclosure marketplace is one of the few growing areas in real estate at the moment. A statement from the companies about the new partnership says that more than 750,000 homes received a foreclosure notice in the third quarter of 2008, up 71 percent from the third quarter of 2007, according to the realtytrac.com US Foreclosure Market Report.

“Our new partnership with homesaledirectory.com reflects our common goal of providing consumers with real estate services that are in great demand,” said Ari Monkarsh, vice president at realtytrac.com. “We look forward to providing homesaledirectory.com and its valued customers with the most comprehensive foreclosure data available on the Internet.”

realtytrac.com is ranked as the third largest real estate site by MediaMetrix and No. 53 on Inc. magazine’s 2006 Inc. 500 list of the nation’s fastest-growing private companies.

Established in 1996, realtytrac.com claims to publish the largest and most comprehensive national database of pre-foreclosure, foreclosure, For Sale By Owner, resale and new construction properties, with more than 1 million properties across the country, property reports, productivity tools and extensive professional resources. With 3 million unique visitors monthly it supplies foreclosure data to MSN Real Estate, Yahoo! Real Estate and The Wall Street Journal’s Real Estate Journal.

Diverse Solutions for Social Media

Social media is all the rage and has been for quite some time – it is almost old news.

But what is the real estate industry actually doing about it?

It seems they’re getting serious about social media.

US based Internet marketing and IDX company Diverse Solutions (DS) has announced the appointment of a new Social Media Manager.

Mike Price has joined the DS team with over 12 years of experience serving the industry. In his most recent role as the president of MLBroadcast Mike has established a a firm foothold as a well respected member of the re.net and social media space.

His blog, Mike’s Corner has become a “go-to” guide for real estate marketing advice and opinion. Price is a frequent speaker and of the organizers of the REBarcamp concept, an industry event platform that has spread to cities across the country.

Diverse Solutions write on their blog:

“Diverse Solutions provides a wide range of Real Estate development services to produced inspired, attention-grabbing, easy to use products. Our decision to create Mike’s role was to extend our customer service experience while engaging clients and prospects of DS within the social media channels, extend the Diverse Solutions brand and offer general assistance with development and IDX questions.”

Appropriately, you can follow Diverse Solutions and Mike on Twitter, Facebook, and Active Rain.

Diverse Solutions are certainly not the first or only real estate related company to hire a social media expert. It is, however, an interesting way to start the new year, and it remains to be seen what 2009 holds for the industry and portals in the realm of social media.

Predictions 2009 - New Zealand

While 2009 was generally a quiet year in the New Zealand property portal market, there was one notable exception – the exit of the REA Group’s allrealestate.co.nz and the subsequent marketing arrangement between the REA Group and its former competitor, realestate.co.nz. There now two main players in the residential property portal market and 2009 should see some interesting developments with this new market structure.

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Predictions 2009 - Australia

On the surface, the Australian property portal market ended much the same way it started with realestate.com.au dominating the space and domain.com.au continuing to struggle in second place. We also had myhome.com.au come and go in the market while homehound.com.au and realestateview.com.au continue to show promise but with little headway. However, there were changes at the various players that could mean 2009 will be an interesting year.

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UK Portals Battle for Decreasing Traffic

Internet traffic analyst, comScore has released November figures for the UK. These will be a Christmas present for some, and a source of discontent for others, as the race to claim the overall top spot for 2008 reaches its final stages.

With declining web traffic overall to real estate websites in November, the competition has been heated.

rightmove.co.uk still leads with almost twice the number of unique visitors (1,994,000) as its nearest rival, findaproperty.com (1,069,000) at number two.

Over the last two months findaproperty.com has overtaken propertyfinder.com, who has been relegated to number three (1,030,000).

Controversially, the Digital Property Group, which owns findaproperty.com, as well as findanewhome.com (33rd with 96,000), primelocation.com (4th with 908,000) and homesandproperty.co.uk (8th with 300,000), claims to have closed the gap on rightmove.co.uk.

In November the difference between the number of unique visitors to rightmove.co.uk and the Digital Property Group’s portals was at an all time low of only 211,000. Mark Milner, chief executive of Digital, was quoted in Estate Agent Today as saying: “We have firmly established ourselves as second in the market place and are most certainly gaining ground on the market leader.”

However, the Digital Property Group makes its claims based on combining web traffic for all their portals together, whereas rightmove.co.uk is a single website.

It isn’t the only claim the Digital Property Group have made about the November figures. Earlier this month findanewhome.com claimed it had overtaken UK market leader smartnewhomes.com as the most-visited new homes portal. smartnewhomes.com issued a statement suggesting that the number one spot was only held by findanewhome.com for a short period of time, meaning smartnewhomes.com is still the market leader.

Meanwhile propertyindex.com has issued a statement claiming it has not only overtaken one of its biggest competitors, globrix.com, but also bucked the market trend by doubling its visitor traffic in November. propertyindex.com came in at number fifteen on the list (211,000), with globrix.com at number twenty one (171,000).

Visitor numbers to propertyindex.com in November were reported to be more than double the amount recorded for October and five times the volume of visitor traffic reported for June 2008. By contrast traffic to all real estate websites in the UK fell by around 20%. In November total UK real estate traffic was 6,595,000 while in September it was as high as 7,719,000.

propertyindex.com’s chief executive, Lee Bramzell is putting a very positive spin on the comScore results:

“The fact that we’ve seen our traffic increase in a declining market bodes extremely well for the future. It’s certainly not all doom and gloom…”

“Industry insights such as the comScore figures are invaluable to new portals and will no doubt send a clear message to all estate agents and developers planning how best to market their properties for sale and rent in 2009.”

The comScore Top 10 for UK real estate in November 2008 was:

1. rightmove.co.uk
2. findaproperty.com
3 propertyfinder.com
4. primelocation.com
5. realestate.com.au
6. nestoria.co.uk
7. vebra
8. homesandproperty.co.uk
9. Trovit UK Homes
10. houseprices.co.uk

James Caan Buys 25% of look4aproperty.com

James Caan, entrepreneur and star of the BBC’s popular business pitching show, Dragon’s Den, has become chairman of independent UK property portal look4aproperty.com.

The news was announced on look4aproperty.com’s blog, which says that James Caan sees the move as a clear sign of his confidence in the UK housing market.

Through the investment arm of his business empire – Hamilton Bradshaw – Caan has secured a 25 per cent stake in look4aproperty.com. The exact figures involved in the deal have not been disclosed.

look4aproperty.com was founded by young entrepreneur Aaron Turner. “Aaron Turner is one of the most innovative and successful entrepreneurs in the country and I am delighted to be working with him,” said Caan.

Aaron Turner established look4aproperty.com in 2004, after working for 12 months as a ‘young MD’ for The Caudwell Group, which is the parent company of several other major businesses, including Phones 4U and 20:20 Mobile Group. During Turner’s time at the company he was the subject of a BBC documentary for The Money Programme.

Caan and Turner say they plan to announce a series of new products to kick-start the struggling UK housing market in the New Year.

“I see this investment as an important move in the face of the current recession,” says Caan.

fizber.com Partners With condo.com

For sale by owner real estate search engine fizber.com has announced a partnership with condo.com, the world’s largest condo marketplace.

The partnership will let buyers visiting US based fizber.com search for the latest condo listings from condo.com in their local markets and across the country.

fizber.com offers the largest national database of for sale by owner (FSBO), pre-foreclosure, foreclosure, and new home construction properties, with more than 2 million properties across the country. It hosts over 1 million unique monthly visitors. The site offers to list for-sale properties on a multiple listing service for a flat fee, with properties submitted to other property search engines for an additional fee.

condo.com has over 600,000 listings for sale and for rent in the United States and 70 countries and receives over 1 million visitors monthly.

“This new relationship will make it easier for homebuyers, investors and real estate agents and brokers to search and view condo properties on our site,” said Julia Foster, fizber.com VP of Marketing.

Matt Pluznick, VP of Strategic Development for condo.com, added, “This exciting new partnership with fizber.com allows condo.com to reach a brand-new audience of over 1 million potential customers through the seamless distribution of our condo listings to the fizber.com site. This new audience combined with our current condo.com community of over 1 million visitors monthly - and growing - supports our mission to be a huge and valuable resource to the multi-family real estate industry making this partnership ideal.”

In November condo.com announced a partnership with themovechannel.com, which gave condo.com users access to over 10,000+ international properties located in Spain, Portugal, Turkey, Bulgaria, France, Cyprus, England, Italy and more.

TomTom Enters Online Mapping

TomTom, known for its popular GPS, has launched an online mapping solution.

TomTom Route Planner is free and allows door-to-door directions to be mapped for the US and Canada. Of interest to the real estate industry is that it will compete with MapQuest and Google Maps. Some property portals already supply driving directions to properties, in addition to map based search.

The online maps are currently in beta but already have the benefit of TomTom’s live traffic information, smart routing, and “Map Share” daily improvements to accuracy.

In a statement about the Route Planner’s launch, Harold Goddijn, TomTom’s chief executive officer said: “The introduction of the online Route Planner marks an important step in our strategy to make our award-winning navigation available for all users, regardless of the platform that is used. Users who do not have a navigation device can now also benefit from our high-quality routing”.

Depending on the success and feedback from the beta programme, the TomTom online Route Planner will gradually be rolled out to users worldwide.

Only last week propertyportalwatch.com reported on the area of online mapping hotting up, with redfin.com choosing Google Maps over Microsoft’s Virtual Earth.

Meanwhile Google is facing further trouble with its popular but controversial Street View application. A group of Japanese lawyers and professors have asked Google to close down its Street View feature of Google Maps in the country.

homegain.com What If You Could Predict the Future

Almost everyone would like to predict the future, and now you can. Well, almost. You can predict what might happen to the value of your property if you altered or added to your house.

US real estate connection website homegain.com aims to connect home seekers and sellers with agents and brokers. For example, users can compare locate and compare real estate agents, research home values, and view homes for sale. Real estate agents can use it to promote their services and market their business. It also claims to have been one of the first websites that offered free online instant home valuations.

homegain.com has just announced the addition of a new “what if” feature, which keeps them ahead of the game in terms of online valuations.

The “what if” feature allows users to hypothetically add a room(s), bathroom(s) and/or some extra square footage to a home, and see what the changes would do to the value of their home. The what if function recalculates a new estimate, based on the changes.

Home Sale MaximizerTM is an additional tool in the “Get Homes Value” section that helps homeowners determine which home improvements such as home staging, landscaping or painting may best increase the resale values of their homes.

homegain.com’s General Manager, Louis Cammarosano, was quoted on RISmedia as saying:

“Our new ‘what if’ feature gives homeowners an indication of the potential value of their home before they get started on major home renovations. This enables people to make more informed decisions about their home and to plan for the future. Visitors who have questions can directly contact real estate agents in more than 2,100 ZIP codes across the country.”

To see the ‘what if’ application in action, visit: homegain.com/homevalues.

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