Google Real Estate and Nerang, Highland Park, Carrara and Worongary

Glenn Batten | 14th August, 2009
Tagged: google real estate, portals, realestate.com.au | Make a Comment »

Up to now Real Estate on the internet in Australia has been controlled by RealEstate.com.au which is a property portal that most agents upload their properties to.

In New South Wales the Domain.com.au portal also holds significant marketshare but here in Queensland it is very much a one horse race with Domain.com.au and other portals like Homehound.com.au and Myhome.com.au barely registering a challenge.

Realestate.com.au has built this up through sheer listing numbers. With around 95% of all agents uploading to realestate.com.au you can be pretty sure that most properties available through real estate agents are available on the portal.

But Is It The Best?

On a strictly numbers level Realestate.com.au is the best without questions. But on a usability level you need to be your own judge. Realestate.com.au is a corporation and accordingly the portal is often focussed too hard on money and very little else. Unfortunatley the pursuit of higher and higher profits generated from agents has impacted the portal to the detriment of property seekers.

Let me Explain!

Google Real Estate and Nerang, Highland Park, Carrara and Worongary There are a few issues of concern but one of the key ones for a buyer is that no matter what search you conduct on realestate.com.au you will only ever be able to view the FIRST 200 properties returned for that search. In our primary trade area this is over 980 property for sale right now on RealEstate.com.au.

Realestate.com.au sell feature property upgrades to propert owners for $90 per month so they can jump to the beginning of the queue and this exacerbates the 200 property search limit problem. In popular suburbs there can easily be 100 or more feature properties. This means that quite often there is under 100 spots that properties are rotated through and as property is listed in date order brand new properties push older ones out of those 100 spots very quickly. In some suburbs a property where the owner has not paid for feature status may only last as long as 10 to 14 days in top 200 for a suburb wide search.

These issues have resulted in agents trying to cheat the system. Even though it is up against the portals terms and conditions and can result in agents being suspended from the site many agents try to cheat by removing and reloading properties so they appear at the top of the queue again which in turn pushs everybody else down the list faster and faster self perpetuating the problem over and over.

It is not unusual for property seekers to overlook a suitable property because it just never shows up in any of their searches. This problem is at its worst in high turnover and more popular suburbs, just like Nerang and when you select the “surrounding suburbs” option as then you are trying to cram 10 suburbs into just 200 results.

Because realestate.com.au and a few other portals charge for these services they have to justify their cost and one way they do that is to quantify their results. This means they try to get you to view more and more properties on there site rather than visit the agents own website directly and all enquiries are funnelled through their portal.

One side effect of them controlling all enquiries from the site happened last year when millions of enquiry emails to real estate agents were lost by realestate.com.au for over 10 weeks. Many people never got an answer from agents right around Australia but that was because RealEstate.com.au never sent it on.

Another casulty in the hunt for more money is the advertising on the site. The level of advertising is just mind boggling. If you stop and count there is nearly 80 paid advertising links on just the front page alone. The individual property pages are not much better. It’s a bit like reading your sunday papers and watching as the traditional news content is slowly being reduced and replaced by pages and pages of ads.

Google Real Estate Launched

In the past few weeks Google has launched Real Estate on Google Maps. The way Google handles real estate is completley different than how traditional property portals handle real estate. It approaches it very much like a traditional search engine method.

Instead of real estate agencies paying to list properties, Google treats real estate agents as simply a data source, a place to get information to serve up to you, the consumer. Google displays that information primarily using a mapping interface so you can see all property for a given area all at the same time.

Using the same methodology they use for web searches Google simply indexes the property for sale and property for rent. This means they only keep a snippet of information on each listing. Enough to show you an overview of the property. This works exactly like their normal web search. If you want to know more informaiton you can click on the property and visit the agents site directly to get more information.

Google also allows other websites to use their informaiton in what is called a mashup. So sites like www.baseestate.com are able to display all the properties that are on Google. This is probably the primary reason why RealEstate.com.au and Domain.com.au dont want to provide their information to Google. They dont want to be providing the data for a heap of spin offs that in the end they are competing with for eyeballs.

Many agents and the smaller portals are uploading property to Google. Google will actually take real estate listings from anybody but as yet Realestate.com.au and Domain.com.au has refused to release their information to Google. Because both of these two top portals are either fully or majority owned by traditional media companies, News Ltd and the Fairfax Group both have undertaken a media campaign to discredit Google’s play into the Real Estate field.

When large public companies feel pressured they do what they always do and apply marketing spin in bucketloads. The media machines have trumpeted an industry expert as playing down the Google threat but failed to mention that he is the ex CEO of RealEstate.com.au and still significant shareholder in the company. The top two portals have claimed that Google only holds 20% of the listing numbers that they do but if they are not providing that information it is impossible to verify.

We decided to put that claim to the test at least locally and we quickly found that the majority of property are on both RealEstate.com.au and Google.Whilst there are not many there are certainly property that are just one of the two portals and not the other. Neither of them features all of the property available.

We have created a very large map where we have overlaid both portals properties on the one map. Google’s results are the red dots and realestate.com.au’s are the blue houses.

The image is far too large to display on this page in full but if you click on this small cropped section of it you will be able to view the full map.

No matter what area you go to in Australia 20% of the agents are doing 80% of the business and that is the same in our area. The top 2 agents are responsible for the vast majority of all sales in the district and we are both uploading to Google Real Estate. This means that at least for the local area, that the vast majority of all listings that will sell next are available right now on Google Real Estate.

So What Does All This Mean?

Forget what you read in the paper, use whatever portal you find works best for you, in fact we would recommend that you use at least 2 or three portals to make sure you get the best coverage you can.

If you are looking to purchase property you probably need to be using both Realestate.com.au and Google Real Estate. Technically you dont have to use Google own mapping interface, you could use one of the current mashups like Base Estate or one of the many that are currently being developed.

If anything Google Real Estate makes it much easier to locate properties that you may have overlooked due to RealEstate.com.au’s 200 property limit.

Google Real Estate and Nerang, Highland Park, Carrara and Worongary As part of a staged rollout Google will soon integrate their real estate listings into their normal search pages like they do for other markets around the world. This will massively increase the exposure of all listings on Google to millions and millions of Australians using the standard Google web search.

If you are looking to sell property then you need to make sure that your agent uploads your property to both Google and RealEstate.com.au. In fact with Google it does not cost the agent anything to upload your property and is a great indicator of at least their basic technical understanding.

Nerang First National proudly uses both RealEstate.com.au and Google Real Estate and as always we are simply the best selection for buying or selling property in the district.