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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Google Street View Arrives in NZ

This week the Google Street View function went live in New Zealand.

First on the Street View bandwagon were property portal market leader trademe.co.nz and number two player realestate.co.nz, plus nz.open2view.com who all introduced the application on Tuesday, the day the application launched.

House hunters can now use the application to visualise the street and surroundings. It provides a street by street view of the whole country, available with a 360° horizontal and 290° vertical panoramic street-level view.

While many have raised privacy concerns about Google Street View, it is an invaluable resource for homehunters, and provides non-photoshopped and more impartial visual information than a real estate agent’s photos might do. For instance, Street View will reveal not only the house for sale or rent, but the neighbours, and the outlook. People caught on Google’s cameras have had their faces blurred to prevent their identity from being revealed.

Until the change this week, trademe.co.nz had previously used SMAPs. SMAPs ran on a back-end created by Wellington company Project X, and a front-end developed by an inhouse trademe.co.nz team.

trademe.co.nz’s head of commercial, Mike O’Donnell , told The National Business Review: “We had a lot of positive feedback about SMAPs from our members, but the fact is that mapping is not our core business and Google‘s better at innovating in this area.”.

O’Donnell also said that despite initial resistance to the function when SMAPs were first introduced 2 and half years ago, uptake had been improving. Useage has risen from only 18% of listings having this feature when SMAPs were first launched, to 51% of listings using Google Street View as of this week.

The Google Street View photos were taken by cameras mounted on cars, which took a year to circle New Zealand covering all areas except Hokitika and Greymouth, where bad weather prevented images from being taken.

Google Street View is already used by other property portals in Australia, the US, France and Japan.

REA Group Directs Traffic to realestate.co.nz

Having decided to close down most of its New Zealand operations, the REA Group has now entered a marketing arrangement to drive traffic to former competitor, realestate.co.nz.

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REA Group Closes NZ Operations

Breaking news across our desk is that the REA Group is closing their New Zealand operations.

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realestate.co.nz

realestate.co.nz is the most comprehensive real estate website in New Zealand with over 107,000 listings representing over 95% of all listings of licensed real estate agents. Nielsen Online places realestate.co.nz as the number 2 website for real estate in terms of web traffic.

realestate.co.nz is a joint venture between the Real Estate Institute of New Zealand (REINZ) and Property Page (NZ) Ltd (PPL), a company with shareholding by the major real estate companies in NZ.

The website has grown significantly since it was re-launched in August 2006 as a re-branding of realenz.co.nz, owned by REINZ since the early 1990s, and now has a total net revenue of around NZ$3 million.

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