Online Real Estate Technology

Another real estate portal has launched onto the Australian property market and this one with the unusual name of Enormo Australia. Their tag line, “Every property Everywhere” sums up what they are all about as well as being one of the worlds largest property portals with over 7 million properties world wide.

I’ve been playing with the site today and I have to admit to being a little underwhelmed by their search functionality, and I can’t really see what they are doing differently to the other portals.

The site is nice and clean with little clutter and free of annoying third party advertising, but as a consumer tool it’s a very bland offering. Compared to what’s currently available with video and multiple photos etc, this really doesn’t offer me, the property consumer, anything I don’t already have or want. In fact in checking some of the properties, I noticed a lot were listed back in 2008 and 2 examples I looked at were 12 months out of date.

Enormo Australia Front Screen

As I’ve said a lot of times in the past, when asked the question about whether an agent should support new property web sites coming into the market, if it is a free offering by all means, use the site, but if they are charging you to list your properties then you really need to look very closely at what you will get from paying to be there.  Yes, they have a strong international base and if you are looking for that market, then you could justify the cost, but for the domestic market, I’d wait a little longer and look at how they perform locally.

Property View Page

 
When I searched Google for Enormo Australia they didn’t come up on the first page, so that they’ll have to fix.

The cost to you at this stage is US$ 129 for 1 – 100 listings and US$188 for 101 – 1000 listings. This without any qualification on traffic numbers etc in Australia and with Myhome and Homehound still offering a free listing service and struggling to get consumer support, it’ll be interesting to watch how Enormo plans to sell this to the consumer, let alone the industry.

My advice, is wait and see how they perform before you go and spend your money on advertising and listing, particularly when budgets are tight and you need to account for every dollar and make those dollars drive leads.

Now, if one of the portals would look at taking advantage of what is happening with Social media and include as part of or supplemental to the subscription, tools such as Blogging,podcasting and Video logging, all attached to the suburb searches and feeding off the traffic, to me that would be providing you the agents a valuable tool, instead of looking at new product all the time that AM’s struggle to sell.