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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trulia.com Founders on Top 10 Newsmakers List

As part of the annual Swanepoel TRENDS Report that is published each February in the US, the top 10 Newsmakers in Real Estate list is compiled by the company’s research team.

Representing the world of property portals on the top 10 Newsmakers list for 2008 are trulia.com’s founders, Pete Flint and Sami Inkinen, who came in at number nine.

Author of the list, Stefan Swanepoel, blogged about the Top 10, saying of trulia.com:

“As founders of Trulia these two leaders, in spite of the current financial difficulties and the market downturn, continue to go against that flow and have raised funding in the amount of $33 million, which solidifies Trulia as a dotcom company that could survive the economic and/or Web 2.0 downturn to become one of the new paradigm companies to shape the future”.

At number one on the list is William Foley, founder and CEO of Fidelity National Financial (FNF). The company’s real estate division, Fidelity National Real Estate Solutions, provides real estate information, media and technology for homeowners and professionals, including the cyberhomes.com portal.

At number seven is Saul Klein, CEO of Point2 Technologies. And at number eight is Charles McMillan, the 2009 President of the National Association of REALTORS.

Newsmakers are defined by the company as those people that during the year made headlines as individuals, as a result of their actions and leadership of the companies or associations they are involved with in the real estate industry.

The second list to be released is the Top 10 Events Impacting on Real Estate for 2008. Among the key events for 2008 are: the election, ActiveRain reaching 100,000 members, twitter, NAR celebrating 100 years and, of course, the bailout, which comes top of the list.

Find out more about the Swanepoel TRENDS Report at their website: retrends.com

zillow.com Gives Free Advice

US based property valuation site and portal zillow.com has added a new user-based advice feature to its website.

Zillow Advice combines the old Home Q&A and discussion forums into one Advice section where users can ask questions which are answered by other users in the zillow.com online community.

The new feature was revealed by David Gibbons, zillow.com’s director of community relations, in a blog post. It is designed to give users access to the 1.2 million agents, lenders and other professionals who use Zillow each month. Gibbons wrote:

“Zillow visitors post 40,000 contributions to the site each day. Many of those are Home Q&A, Real Estate Guides and Discussions. These features now live under a new Advice tab and we are adding local Questions to the list of ways in which Zillow users can help each other.”

It brings zillow.com in line with rival trulia.com, who offer a similar Q+A forum through Trulia Voices Real Estate Community.

Zillow.com came out number three in the Hitwise November 2008 top 10 US real estate websites. trulia.com has been rising rapidly, and came in at number 11.

In a blog by John Cook on Techflash, he quotes interesting compete.com data that shows a dip in traffic for both zillow.com and trulia.com in recent months.

realtor.com Still On Top

Of the 3,194 real estate websites Hitwise tracked in November realtor.com came out number one in terms of US market share, retaining its top dog status.

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trulia.com

Trulia, Inc., a residential real estate search engine and the fastest-growing US real estate Web site (comScore), has revolutionised online home search by offering a rich, intuitive user experience that points consumers directly to listings on agent and broker Web sites. By partnering with the real estate industry, trulia.com helps approximately 5 million unique visitors per month find information on homes for sale using custom search criteria.

The site also provides market trends and neighbourhood data at the hyper-local level, as well as Trulia Voices, a real estate Q&A community, that enables consumers and professionals to exchange information about their local markets. Other applications such as Trulia Snapshots and widgets are also available.

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Trulia Platform Powers 100 Websites

trulia.com is the fastest growing US real estate web site, according to comScore figures. Their listing partners grow daily, and already includes 93 of the top 100 largest US brokers. And they welcome over 5 million unique visitors per month to use their real estate search engine.

Their fastest growing status is also no doubt due in part to the large success of theTrulia Publisher Platform (TPP), a hosted technology solution that gives web publishers the ability to create co-branded online real estate sections powered by trulia.com’s search technology. In less than a year they have hit a key milstone by signing up 100 companies.

Companies like national web publishers U.S. News & World Report, regional newspapers like The Bakersfield Californian and Seattle Weekly, and websites like americantowns.com and kiplinger.com are using Trulia’s TPP to power their real estate search.

“As newspapers, magazines and Web publishers continue to evolve their business models, the Trulia Publisher Platform is an excellent alternative to their web site’s home search needs,” said Pete Flint, co-founder and CEO of Trulia. “Because of the easy integration, best-in-class technology and favorable economics for the publishers, we’ve been able to power real estate search for over 100 websites in less than a year.”

The technology is completely free of charge, and also profitable for publishers who can add their own display advertising. And because Trulia hosts the TPP site co-brand, implementation is turn-key and publishers always have immediate access to Trulia’s latest functionality and features.

In a blog post entitled “11 point plan to save the newspaper industry” the company offers advice for newspaper executives, in light of the recent news of a 31% annual decline in total classified revenues, and the expectation of an extended recession. There’s no denying newspapers are at a critical stage and trulia.com’s advice to them is to “quit, partner or outsource” everything they can:

“With the classified industry headed only one way, it’s time to re-think your strategy here. That almost certainly means getting out of these businesses and building partnerships instead that will be much more profitable. Partner with Monster/Careerbuilder for jobs, Trulia for Real Estate, cars.com for Autos, eHarmony for Personals. Many of these companies have partnership models like Trulia which offer free co-branded search experiences and revenue generating products that can quickly turn a loss making business into a profit center. Trulia has more than 100 partner sites live that enable innovative local newspapers and publishers to build a profitable world-class real estate solution in a matter of days. Reduce your business down to original content creation and sales, that will mean taking some tough decisions.”

It’s an interesting sales pitch for the company. trulia.com makes its money through advertising with brokers and other businesses, not lead generation, so the more hits the better – for them, their paid advertisers and their real estate agents.

Trulia partners with 1020 Placecast

Real estate search engine trulia.com has forged a relationship with breakthrough advertising service 1020 Placecast. The partnership will involve using location information to target specific audiences for advertisers on trulia.com.

Real estate is a fairly obvious partner for technology of this kind. From the moment users type in a search location on trulia.com, the 1020 Placecast technology will spring into action, showing relevant advertisements for that locale. Or more technically: Placecast’s proprietary targeting algorithms correlate these with dozens of other demographic, psychographic and geographic data points.

Alistair Goodman, CEO of Placecast remarked, ”Once we know the place a user is interested in, we can derive a lot of useful insights about what kind of consumer they are, and then serve them a very targeted ad.”

The technology aims to improve response rates to advertisements, therefore CPM for the publisher. One of the first advertisers to take advantage of it on trulia.com is leading car rental brand, Avis-Budget.

Sean Black, Vice President of Sales at Trulia was quoted as saying: ”Turning locations into audiences is one of the biggest challenges facing advertisers today. Trulia presents advertisers with multiple opportunities to serve very targeted ads based on location and consumers’ search behavior. Placecast is a cutting edge media company and we are excited to be working with them and their clients to build and deliver successful campaigns.”

1020 Placecast is funded by Voyager Capital and Onset Ventures and recently earned an OnMedia Top 100 Award, given to game-changing companies in the marketing, branding, advertising, and PR industries. Current advertisers working with them include Microsoft Windows Mobile, FedEx Kinko’s and Hyatt Hotels, and trulia.com will no doubt be looking to capture some of this valuable advertising revenue as they are free-to-list for estate agents.

Turning Around Move - the US Leader

Move Inc, the owner and operator of move.com, realtor.com and Top Producer is trading at 5 year lows - can they turn around the business?

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Open Web Awards Honour trulia.com

Finalists in the second annual Open Web Awards have been revealed, and US property search engine trulia.com is a finalist in three categories – the only property website to be included.

The Open Web Awards are run by Mashable. It is the only multilingual international online voting competition that covers major innovations in web technology, recognising achievements across 26 categories.

trulia.com has been selected a finalist in all three categories in which it was nominated: Search and Social Search; Mobile Applications; and Embeddable Widgets.

If it wins, trulia.com will be able to add the award (or awards) to its ever expanding trophy cabinet. It counts among its accolades the 2008 People’s Voice Webby Award for real estate, and the 2006 Business Week Best of the Web Award for real estate.

Voting ends on 15 December, and winners will be announced on 16 December.

trulia.com Number 1 Lead Generator

In such a tight market, lead generation is bound to become more important.

This week trulia.com has said that data shows its US real estate search engine to be the number one lead generator in its market.

The claims are made based on data coming from trulia.com’s partner, Threewide Corporation, whose ListHub is the most widely adopted network for listing distribution, working with MLSs, franchises and brokerages.

Threewide analysed 600k listings sent from MLSs and brokers to 16 of the largest real estate sites for the month of October 2008 and discovered that trulia.com generated the most leads in this period with almost 12,500 - over 30% of all client leads.

A lead is defined as occuring when a consumer submits their contact information to the listing broker or agent via the broker/MLS designated landing page. The next closest competitor to trulia.com had just over 15% of all leads and the 3rd just over 12%, with the top 5 making up almost 80% of all leads sent.

trulia.com also says it had the highest percentage of redirected traffic with over 35% of all traffic sent to ListHub clients. Redirect occurs when consumer clicks from channel site (eg: Trulia) to broker/MLS designated landing page.

trulia.com wrote on its blog:

“Over 8,000 listings received at least 1 lead from a consumer coming directly from trulia.com, with our nearest competitor sending traffic resulting in leads for a little over 3,600 listings.”

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