Online Real Estate Technology

One of the easiest ways to stay up to date with the latest on social media, technology and internet marketing, is to get the news delivered straight to your email inbox as it happens.

By subscribing to our weekly newsletter, you’ll receive the latest updates on research, technology and social media as well as tips and handy advice on how to improve your internet marketing.

Included in our weekly newsletter is advice on how to improve your web sites rankings on search engines such as Google and we also look at the impact of social media and technology on search engine rankings.

We respect your privacy and one of my pet hates is when you subscribe to a newsletter, your email address is sold to 3rd parties and you get a whole heap of spam, we do not sell or promote your email address to anyone, so you can subscribe with the knowledge that your email address is protected.

If you would like to get our newsletter delivered to you, please click on the subscribe link below and you’ll start to receive our weekly updates.

Yes please, Subscribe me to Mike Andrew Consulting’s Weekly Newsletter

New research from the US today has revealed that Home buyers are twice as likely to use on line sources than print sources to find information about open houses they are interested in, this is according to research conducted by Harris Interactive.

The survey commissioned for Trulia.com found that 62% of US home buyers use or plan to use on line sites to find open houses, compared with 53% who use/plan to use information from real estate agents, 36% who use/plan to use neighborhood signs and less than one-third (31%), who use/plan to use print sources, including newspapers and local flyer’s. 

The study also found that though many home buyers rely upon a range of different sources to gather information about open houses, 41% say online sources are their primary resource, while 14% cite print sources.

More than 9 in 10 home buyers in the US (91%) attended or plan to attend open houses during their home-purchase process.

“The real estate section of the weekend newspaper is no longer the go-to resource for open houses,” said Sami Inkinen, co-founder and COO of Trulia. “Home buyers are increasingly going on line to not only search for the most up to date listings but also to obtain rich information about the neighborhood, schools, and local shops.”

Inkinen added that on line sites – such as Trulia – and related iPhone applications have experienced dramatic growth in recent years because they enable home buyers to search for open houses in neighborhoods that interest them, sign up for email alerts and learn more about the local areas in which they’re looking.

“We used to see home buyers walk into open houses with a newspaper in their hands,” said Aman Daro, VP of Integrated Marketing at McGuire Real Estate in San Francisco. “But now they walk in with print outs of their search on the web. What’s more, consumers are walking in very educated from their on line research – they know details about the property and the neighborhood, and are more highly engaged in the process than the casual lookers of years past.”

Here are the results of the survey as published by Harris:

On Line Vs Print

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.

I first wrote about walkscore.com back in September, How Walkable is Your Home or Suburb? – Like to Find Out? and I’ve been an advocate of it’s use by real estate agents in Australia. One of the real estate sites has even done some research on it’s impact on a property listing, when used as one of the images and surprise surprise, it’s the most clicked on image on the listing, so it comes as no surprise to me that the site has continued to grow in popularity.

Last week, at the Inman Technology conference in new York, it was reported that the Walk Score rating system was being added to over 85 million property listings in the US. You’ll soon see the rating system on the major real estate portals such as Zillow.com.

Walk Score promotes the car free lifestyle by providing a personalised walk-ability rating for any address. 

The company says: “Homebuyers rank proximity to daily conveniences as one of the two most important factors in choosing a neighborhood.

Check out the web site on www.walkscore.com.

In a partnership designed to continue to grow Domain.com.au’s impact on Australian real estate searchers, they have announced a content distribution deal with ebay.com.au and the launch of a new real estate site on ebay. Here’s a link to the new page http://ebay.domain.com.au/

The new site will be linked from the home page of ebay and give domain.com.au access 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.

Lets hope this gives realestate.com.au a run for their money and shake the arrogance this company has for it’s agents and consumers. The industry needs a strong competitor, who will help keep pricing at manageable levels and push technology innovations which sadly have been neglected over the past few years.