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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Online Classifieds to Ruin Newspapers

A report in leading Australian newspaper The Australian today says that newspapers in the country will lose up to $1 billion in revenue over next four years if classified advertising continues to migrate online.

The story arose from the Future of Journalism conference in Melbourne.

Quoting research from EL&C Bailleau stockbrokers at the conference, Ivor Ries said that Australia’s main newspaper companies had already lost $450 million in classified advertising revenue in the past four years.

According to another commentator, worst hit was Fairfax, who own leading newspapers including the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, as well as online property portal domain.com.au, the number 2 player in the Australian online property market.

Read the full article from The Australian here.

In the US, an Inman TV News clip shows Ben Phillips, vice president and MD of Realogy’s openhouse.com, discussing similar issues, with the migration of classifieds online causing industry-run destination sites like openhouse.com to take advertising into their own hands.

realestateview “Fastest Growing” Threat

According to Nielson Net Ratings, between January – October 2008 realestateview.com.au was the fastest growing real estate portal in Australia.

The site achieved a growth of 29.8% versus 8.5% for market leader realestate.com.au and only 0.9% for domain.com.au.

Launched in May 2001, realestateview.com.au is a joint venture between the Real Estate Institute of Victoria Limited (REIV), which holds a majority share, and some of Australia’s leading real estate agencies.

Although it was originally established to offer industry-owned competition to the major independent portals, beginning with Victorian properties, it has failed to bump realestate.com.au or domain.com.au from first and second place.

August 2008 figures placed realestateview.com.au fourth overall, behind homehound.com.au with 312k UB’s.

The market continues to be dominated by realestate.com.au which registered 4.2m UB’s in August.  Second place domain.com.au had 1.9m UB’s while third placed homehound.com.au had 427k UB’s.

domain.com.au Deal With ninemsn.com.au

Australian property portal domain.com.au have signed a deal with ninemsn.com.au for the news site to host their listings.

According to Business 2, the deal comes into effect on 1 December 2008.

domain.com.au’s presence on the website will replace the REA Group, who elected not to renew their contract for realestate.com.au listings on ninemsn.com.au.

As the number two website in the Australian market, domain.com.au is bound to benefit from any extra traffic, but will still need around 2 million extra unique visitors each month to close the gap on market leader realestate.com.au.

ninemsn.com.au is a joint venture between PBL Media and Microsoft. According to Neilsen NetRatings (May 08) over 8.2 million people visit ninemsn.com.au each month, which represents 75 per cent of Australian Internet users. The news website is also the Australian home of Windows Live Hotmail, Windows Live Messenger and Windows Live Search, as well as Channel Nine programmes and Australian Consolidated Press titles.

domain.com.au is is part of the Fairfax Digital Network and, according to information supplied by the company, “each month over 2.4 million unique browsers to domain.com.au and other Fairfax Digital real estate sites conduct more than 200 million page impressions” (Nielsen/Net Ratings MI, November 2007).

Last month we reported that domain.com.au announced a distribution deal with ebay.com, which sees the launch of a new real estate section on ebay.com. realestate.com.au did not bid for this contract either.

domain.com.au Does Distribution Deal with ebay.com.au

Australia’s number 2 site, domain.com.au has just completed a content distribution deal with ebay.com.au that sees the launch of a new real estate section on ebay - ebay.domain.com.au.

The new site will be linked from the home page of ebay and expose the new site to ebay’s 5.4 million unique visitors per month.

What this means is that anyone who clicks on the real estate link on ebay.com.au will see the listings from agents advertising on domain.com.au presented on a co-branded site.

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domain.com.au Launches Feature Home Alerts

domain.com.au in Australia has announced the launch of Feature Home Alerts.  As the promition from domain.com.au says “A Feature Home Alert is an email that focuses entirely on one property that either matches or is based on the criteria you have indicated. It also contains significantly more information on the individual property than within a standard Home Alert.

There is no regular timing for a Feature Home Alert. Depending on how broad your Home Alert criteria is and how many different Home Alerts you may have set up, you may receive more than one Feature Home Alert per day, in addition to your standard Home Alert.”

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Traffic to Australian Property Portal Sites (Aug 2008)

Nielsen NetRatings recently released it figures for the Australian residential property portal market for August 2008. 

The results show that realestate.com.au continues to be the dominant player in the Australian market with 4.2m unique browsers in August compared to the number 2 player in the market, domain.com.au that had only 1.9m unique browsers. 

71% of people looking at the Australian real estate market at least looked at realestate.com.au while 32% at least looked at domain.com.au.  Note: browsers of the real estate category do look at more than one site.

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