Online Real Estate Technology

AUSTRALIAN housing markets displayed a generally resilient performance in 2011, reflecting the inherent security of residential real estate in this country, particularly when compared with housing markets in similar open-market economies.

The year was always set to be a period of correction for Australia’s housing markets following the unsustainable growth in house prices recorded through 2009 and 2010.

Between January 2009 and June 2010, Melbourne’s quarterly median house price rose by nearly 30 per cent, with Sydney’s up by almost 20 per cent over the same period. All other capitals also recorded big rises in house prices over those 18 months.

Housing affordability crashed by the end of 2010, with surging house prices and rising interest rates combining to send buyers into hibernation.

Australian Property Monitors data has revealed that capital city housing markets have generally performed encouragingly in 2011 despite the pressure on housing affordability generated in 2010 and a mixed economic performance in 2011.

The national median price for houses over the year to October 2011 fell by just 1 per cent compared with the previous year, with median unit prices rising by 1.2 per cent over the year. The 2011 result follows a 17 per cent rise in the national median house price over the year to October 2010 and a 12.2 per cent rise in the median unit price over the same period.

The best capital city performers were Melbourne and Sydney, where annual median house prices rose by 1 per cent. Darwin and Adelaide house prices were flat and Hobart down 1.5 per cent.

The worst performers over the year were Brisbane and Perth, where annual median house prices fell by 3.5 and 4.75 per cent respectively.

The unit market clearly outperformed the housing market over the year to October 2011, with Sydney recording median unit price growth of 2 per cent followed by Melbourne and Darwin up by 1 per cent. Brisbane and Perth were again the underperformers, with annual unit prices falling by 1.3 per cent and 3.5 per cent respectively.

Bureau of Statistics data confirms the solid performance by Australian housing markets in 2011, with the number of owner-occupier housing loans rising by 2.4 per cent over the 10 months ending October compared with the same period in 2010.

New South Wales was the best performer with an increase of 8 per cent, with Western Australia surprisingly in second place with growth in home loans of 7 per cent over the year, courtesy of a surge in the past three months – indicating perhaps growing late-year momentum in that market.

By contrast, the number of home loans approved in Queensland in the year to October fell by 8.4 per cent compared with the same period in 2010.

The nature and strength of Australian housing markets in 2011 was always to be determined by the underlying supply and demand characteristics of individual markets and the strength of national and local economies.

In addition to the affordability barriers created by the prices surge and interest rate rises of 2009 and 2010, housing markets have had to encounter unexpected headwinds in 2011. The impact of the central Queensland and Brisbane floods was not restricted to the local housing markets. National economic output was affected through reduced coal exports and the cost of the reconstruction levy. Higher prices for fruit and vegetables also affected household budgets nationally.

The impact of catastrophic natural disasters on the national psyche and confidence cannot be underestimated, particularly given Australia’s recent propensity for financial conservatism, especially when it comes to buying or borrowing.

The Japanese earthquake and associated tsunami in March also contributed to lower economic growth and reduced consumer confidence.

Stalling economic growth in 2011 was also a product of continued mixed performances by various industry sectors, particularly retail, manufacturing, tourism and construction. As a consequence, all capitals recorded rises in unemployment through mid-year. All these factors combined to subdue consumer capacity and confidence and consequently dampen home buying activity through 2011.

Most Australian capital city housing markets are, however, set to record growth in median prices over 2012 as the national economy gathers strength. The Australian economy is primed to expand strongly on the back of a significant resources boom with the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development predicting gross domestic product will increase by 4 per cent over the year.

Melbourne, Adelaide and Hobart will be the underperformers in 2012, with median house price growth of between zero and 5 per cent.

Melbourne’s balanced housing supply and demand mix offers buyers a wide choice and it remains the most tenant-friendly capital city rental market. Affordability barriers, however, remain for home buyers.

With the Victorian economy showing signs of running out of puff, particularly as the recent construction boom abates, the housing market is set to drift sideways though 2012. The possibility remains of some growth in median house prices by the end of 2012 as the impact of a strong national economy filters through.

Dr Andrew Wilson is senior economist for Australian Property Monitors.

Source: BusinessDay

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Australia experienced one of the strongest housing markets in the world during 2010, new research shows.

But likely interest rate hikes will slow the market in 2011, the Global Real Estate Trends report predicts.

The report, released by Canada’s Scotiabank, tracked the housing markets in 12 advanced economies throughout 2010.

Home prices increased in Australia, Canada, France, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.

They remained flat in Germany and the United States, and fell in Ireland, Italy, Japan and Spain.

Australia led the pack, thanks to relatively-low unemployment and tight housing supply.

But interest rate hikes and a cut to the first homeowners grant slowed a "red-hot" property market in 2010 to some degree, the report said.

Economist Adrienne Warren anticipates the Reserve Bank of Australia will lift interest rates by an additional 75 basis points in 2011.

Australia’s close trade ties with Asia and resource wealth would continue to underpin a solid pace of domestic activity.

"Higher interest rates will worsen already strained affordability," Ms Warren said in a statement.

Canada’s market also fared well, but was "one of the most volatile" expected to be tempered by more moderate employment and income growth in 2011.

The UK property market staged a strong early-year recovery while Germany’s decade-long housing slump also came to an end.

But it was a different story in Spain, Ireland and Italy, where the market continues to fall.

Japan’s two-decade long property slump continued in 2010, and is expected to slump further in 2011 on the back of a weaker economy.

The surprise result came from the US where the housing market stabilised.

That trend is expected to continue, with the report predicting the US Federal Reserve to maintain its record-low 0.25 per cent rate through the end of 2011.

Source: www.ninemsn.com.au

A large California based real estate brokerage with more than 700 agents has announced a joint venture with a major international real estate franchisor this week.

Altgera Real Estate is forming a new company, Harcourts Pacific, with New Zealand based franchisor Harcourts International which has more than 630 offices and more than 4,000 agents in nine countries including New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, China, Fiji, Indonesia, Zambia, and Singapore.
Altera marks the company’s first venture in the United States, adding 23 independently owned offices and more than 700 agents to the franchise’s network. Real Trends ranked Altera Real Estate as No. 101 of the 500 largest brokerages in the country by sales volume in 2009.
Financial details about the transaction were not disclosed, though Mike Green, managing director for Harcourts International, said in a statement, ‘As a 50% shareholder in the US joint venture, Harcourts will have a heavy focus on the American market throughout 2010, as long term plans are put in place for further expansion in the country’.
Both Harcourts International and Altera Real Estate are part of the Leading Real Estate Companies of the World (RELO) organization.
Gary Thomas, one of Altera’’ founders, had met Harcourts executives more than a decade ago, and the franchise company first approached him about a partnership to expand into the US about five months ago, said Dennis Badagliacco, Altera’s president and now president of Harcourts Pacific.
He, his wife Colleen, and Thomas founded Altera in 2008. Both Colleen Badagliacco and Thomas are former presidents of the California Association of Realtors.
All Altera offices will retain their current branding, except any new materials ordered will have ‘a Harcourts company’ added next to the Altera name, he said. Altera asked to retain that branding as part of the deal. Any new franchises the company opens will be branded as Harcourts, he added.
‘We’ll be able to expand services in a geometric way for our agents. Right now, we have one person that handles agent interactions, marketing packages, and then does some educational classes,’ Badagliacco said.
From the Academy, agents ‘can learn to be an agent, in management, or a broker owner. (The agents) are going to take classes equivalent to college classes. There’s no other company in the world that does that that we know of,’ Dennis said.
‘For the training of agents, they don’t have just these one day seminars. They actually have classes in REOs, things like that. We had all of the same things, but didn’t have the volume or the depth that they did,’ he said.
Brokers will also get one on- ne training monthly, he said. Harcourts will also give agents free iPhone and iPad applications to work with. These will include an app for property search and for transaction management as well as listing presentations that can be given on an iPad, Badagliacco said.

Original story from Propertywire.com

The Reserve Bank of Australia decided to leave interest rates on hold at 4.5% in June as they observe the impact that recent rate rises are having on the Australian economy. This is particularly important as Europe tries to deal with its sovereign debt issues. The RBA is paying most attention to the health of the global economy and how it may impact Australia.

For the year to March 2010, the Australian economy showed solid growth, expanding by 2.7%. This is significant when compared to the small 0.7% growth in the previous year. Economists predict a positive outlook with growth forecast to be around 3.5% for the coming year.

Property clearance rates in Melbourne have certainly eased in the past few months from the mid to high 80′s to 65% at present. Stock levels are at a record high for the time of the year. Despite this, our Street News subscribers have indicated that property sales and prices are still strong and that buyer levels at opens are still very good.

Leading industry forecaster, BIS Shrapnel, predicts a modest growth in the Melbourne market over the next three years. "Price performance will be patchy, although we expect the overall shortage of dwellings will prevent a fall in the median house price. On the other hand, price growth will remain very limited due to the rising interest rate pressuring affordability.

Our forecast is for Melbourne’s median house price to rise by a total of 11 per cent over the three year period to June 2013, or a modest 3.5 per cent per annum".

By Peter Sarmas, Managing Director, Street News

Property prices in Australia could start to fall as a result of interest rate cuts and a cut back in mortgage lending, it is claimed. Despite prices increasing by up to 20% in the last year, a six interest rate rises in the last eight months could put the brakes on and there is evidence of a slowdown, experts believe.

REAL estate experts are bracing for the housing market to finally slow down, as the effects of the latest interest rate rise filters through to buyers.

According to Australia’s largest real estate group Ray White, turnover in the first three months of the year is sluggish compared with last year, up only 8%, the smallest increase since the global financial crisis.

The reduced activity has continued in to April, said Brian White, joint chairman. ‘Judging by our April results, it looks as if the interest rate increases are having an impact on activity. With the additional interest rate hike, it would be the first time that the Australian market has not shrugged off the pattern of increases in the past. At last, it would appear that the ambition of the Reserve Bank to slow down the residential activity has been achieved,’ he explained.

Another outcome of soaring prices is an increased in those struggling to make mortgage payments. According to independent interest rate monitor RateCity about 27,000 households have already missed mortgage repayments and thousands more are expected to fall behind after the latest interest rate rise.

The number of securitised home loans more than 90 days in arrears has rapidly increased from 0.05% in January to a current rate of 0.6% it said.

The worsening financial crisis in Europe could also affect the Australian market. Some analysts even believe there might be a rate decrease later in the year, although most are predicting they are likely to remain on hold.

‘There will be a slower housing market in Sydney in the second half of this year, even with a normal economy,’ said SQM Research managing director Louis Christopher. But he added that if the euro zone woes worsen there would be the potential for quarter on quarter falls at the end of the year.

Residex chief executive John Edwards believes price growth will moderate and he forecasts 5 to 8% overall. The top end of the market would do best, while some cheaper areas of south western Sydney were already going backwards.

According to Australian Property Monitors economist Matthew Bell prices in the most expensive half of the property market would rise at twice the rate of the bottom half.

Story from PropertyWire.com

The man who predicted the global credit collapse of 2007 has warned that Australia’s housing bubble is ripe to burst at any time.

US investment banker Edward Chancellor has told the Australian newspaper our economy is yet to emerge from the global financial crisis.

Mr Chancellor, who works for GMO, estimates Australian house prices are more than 50 per cent above their fair value.

He says house prices would have to fall ‘quite considerably’ to revert to their average price in relation to average income.

He also warned first home buyers were among the most vulnerable, saying the ratio of their mortgage repayments to their income would rise to ‘very high levels’ as interest rates continues to rise.

A potential trigger for economic trouble and the collapse of the housing market would come if China’s demand for iron ore and liquefied natural gas slowed, he said.

Original Story taken from www.bigpond.com

I recently received an email from the author of this post Chris Thorman about the potential that Geofencing technology has for the marketing of real estate in the future, and after reading his article I totally agree with him. This technology has huge potential in this country as we are mostly car bound and mobile, so you can imagine the impact of technology that reaches out to prospective buyers and virtually taps them on the shoulder. I hope you enjoy the article and if you’d like to read more on this you can visit Chris’s blog here

It’s Saturday morning. Joel and Rebecca are walking their dog through a neighborhood in Austin, TX. As they walk, they chat about the movie they saw last night, what they’re going to make for dinner, and the big trip they have planned for next weekend. You wouldn’t know it by listening to their conversation, but the couple is also house hunting.
They cross Brodie Lane when Joel’s cell phone buzzes in his pocket. It’s a text message that reads:

Joel says to Rebecca, “We’ve got a match from our real estate company. It’s only four blocks away. Let’s go see what the house looks like.”

Within minutes, the couple is outside the 714 Longview Rd. home. It happens to be exactly the type of home they wanted, in the exact neighborhood they wanted to live in. They call their real estate agent to set up a viewing.

How did this happen? How was the couple instantly notified of the opportunity, perfectly merging buyer requirements, location and timing? The answer involves a combination of “geo-fencing,” mobile phones and GPS technology.

If you’re a tech savvy real estate agent or property manager, this powerful combination of technology represents a great opportunity to gain new clientele. Many real estate buyers do not have the time to review new listings online, travel to viewings or patrol their desired neighborhoods for opportunities. But the vast majority of real estate buyers do have mobile phones they carry with them nearly all the time.

This technology would help real estate and property management companies capitalize on business that may otherwise slip through the cracks. Software Advice would like to see this type of mobile marketing become a permanent feature in today’s property management software systems to help advertise real estate and rental properties.

Let’s see how that could be done.

Geo-Fencing + Mobile Phones = Powerful Real Estate Marketing
What if a buyer looking for a place to live didn’t have to do anything beyond choosing what features they wanted in a home? What if a buyer was automatically alerted to nearby properties that matched their needs?

This is what we’re talking about with the next generation of mobile real estate marketing.

The use of “geo-fences” surrounding properties really drives the location-based marketing engine. A geo-fence is a virtual boundary surrounding a geographic region. When a person with a mobile phone crosses a geo-fence boundary, a notification is automatically issued to that mobile phone. Traditionally, geo-fencing has been used to send alerts when users exit a certain area, instead of entering one.

Geo-fencing has been used in conjunction with GPS technology for a while now and for a variety of uses:

• Tracking senior citizens with Alzheimer’s;
• Ensuring mobile employees don’t travel outside of certain areas; and,
• Monitoring hazardous cargo, to name a few examples.

We’re confident that someday, we’ll be able to add “Market real estate” to that list. Here’s how we see this new form of mobile marketing working in the real estate industry:

Create geo-fences. Before real estate and property management companies set up their online portals, they’ll need to create geo-fences around all of their properties. This will ensure that if a qualified user crosses the geo-fence with their mobile phone, that user will be notified about that property.

We’d like to see geo-fencing modules built into today’s property management software, allowing companies to quickly create geo-fences around their properties by drawing them on a digital map.

Collect buyer needs online. Real estate and property management companies can create online portals on their web sites, where prospective tenants and buyers set up notifications tailored to what they want in a property.

For example, a user could create an alert based on square footage, number of bedrooms, pet friendliness, special amenities, and zip code, to name just a few of the myriad of options available. Once they’ve entered their cell phone number and submitted those housing preferences, all they have to do is carry their phone with them to receive notifications.

We’d also like to see today’s property management software vendors integrate these online portals into their systems. Many property management software vendors offer web site design and hosting packages to their customers. A geo-fencing module could be another module that’s presented as an option to a management company when they purchase the software.

Let the notifications begin. The notifications are where this entire concept of location-based mobile marketing comes together. The geo-fences have been set up. Users have entered their housing preferences online to receive notifications. All that is left is for the users to go about their normal lives, with their GPS-enabled mobile phones, of course.

When they get close to a property that matches their wants, they’ll be automatically notified on their mobile phone. Property management software can then integrate all of these contact points with customers into their CRM system, to track the effectiveness of the messages and review properties with clients.

House hunting couldn’t get much easier than that, could it?

The Benefits
Hopefully by now, the benefits of this unique marketing method are clear.

First, since the user opts in to receive these marketing notifications, there is no feeling of intrusiveness or annoyance as with unsolicited messages. This type of marketing is perceived as a service, not an intrusion.

Second, from a marketing standpoint, notifying the right person, at the right place, at the right time about your product is powerful.

It’s the holy grail of marketing:

• You have a desirable product;
• You have identified the person that wants your product; and,
• You can automatically tell that person that your product is nearby.

Finally, this marketing method is scalable. A real estate or property management company could theoretically have dozens (or more) of users taking advantage of this service at any given time. Beyond taking calls to schedule viewings, it wouldn’t require any extra labor on the part of the management company.

Conclusion
We don’t expect this spin on mobile marketing to be installed in every real estate and property management office tomorrow. But whether through geo-fence triggers or other GPS-centric methods, the real estate industry will undoubtedly continue to make a huge effort over the next few years to connect with buyers and renters through their mobile phones.

The technology is too compelling to ignore.

Google and Real Estate

For those of you who are interested in Googles ultimate goal for its real estate listings service, they have finally announced their plans for the service. In New York, Sam Sebastian, the company’s director of local and business-to-business markets has told the Inman technology conference that Google’s recent refinements in the real estate space, which include creating “place pages” for individual listings, don’t mean the search engine giant is moving to create a national multiple listing service.

He said the recent refinements have improved the quality of traffic the search engine delivers to advertisers — including big brokerages that Google is out to sign up as clients.

“Agents have always been pretty engaged” in buying keywords and targeted ads from Google to drive traffic to their Web sites, Sebastian said. “But the big brokerages that can really do this in scale, and work this into their marketing programs — that’s where I think the future is.”

Since Google got into targeted advertising, agents and small real estate offices have been “very entrepreneurial” in taking advantage of its ability to deliver potential clients, Sebastian said.

“They could compete with the big boys, and we were building a good set of users,” Sebastian said. Then third-party listing aggregation sites emerged, packaging and selling the leads traffic to their sites generated to brokers and agents.

Google got into the listing game itself, through its Google Base service, which accepts listings from agents and third-party aggregators.

Aggregating listings is not nearly as controversial as it was when third-party aggregators started cropping up more than a decade ago, Sebastian said.

But Google has captured the attention of the real estate industry in recent months by creating individual “place pages” for listings and making it easy to find them in map-based searches

Place pages, Sebastian said, were originally created not for real estate, but as a way to give local merchants a presence on Google. Place pages pull content from around the Internet, such as reviews, photos and other information Google has tracked down, organizing it in one place.

When the implications for real estate became clear — that Google, in theory, could amass a database of every property on Earth — not everybody in the industry was thrilled with the idea.

“We got a little bit of hemming and hawing,” Sebastian said. Some wondered if Google was taking the first step in building a national MLS, he said.

But the sites providing the information indexed by Google are finding that the quality of traffic the search engine delivers to their site has improved.

The plan was not to take business from real estate brokers, but to provide a better user experience, Sebastian said.

“It’s not some evil plan we have in Mountain View (Google’s headquarters in California), with millions of folks talking about how we want to take over the real estate markets,” Sebastian said.

Asked about reports that Google has been talking to real estate search site Trulia.com about an acquisition, Sebastian said he could not comment. (A Trulia spokesman told Inman News in December that the company “does not comment on rumors or speculation.”)

But Sebastian did say that Google is likely to continue acquiring one to two “small and nimble” companies a month, a pace it’s kept up for the last 18 months.

Source: Inman News

Rupert Murdock

There’s been a bit of discussion recently in the blog world about Rupert Murdock’s thoughts on search engines, and in particular Google, and the fact that they provide a lot of information to consumers for free that has been sourced from News Ltd publications, Rupert has always been of the opinion that consumers should pay for news or content they recieve on the Internet, just as they would when buying a newspaper or subscribing to a web site to get the content. He has even threatened to block Google from accessing News Ltd sites. So I thought I would publish a story from Newspaper Death Blog which featured a story on Rupert and search engines, so here it is for you:

“The debate over whether search engines are friend or foe to the newspaper industry continues to grow and become more complex.

Rupert Murdoch says he will really go ahead with his stated plans to remove his portfolio of publications from Google search index. Jonathan Miller, News Corp’s chief digital officer, told the Monaco Media Forum on Friday said the company would begin blocking Google’s search spiders within a few months. Miller said that Google brings in an army of one-click visitors who are “the least valuable of traffic to us…You can survive without it.” He also said Murdoch intends to lead the industry in the just-say-no campaign. A Google spokesman responded that the search engine sends about 100,000 clicks to news organizations every minute. TechCrunch estimates that Google drives about one quarter of the traffic to The Wall Street Journal.

While there’s no doubt that Murdoch is serious about drawing a line in the sand on this issue, the decision to talk about it this far in advance indicates that this is a negotiating tactic. Much as Hearst and the New York Times Co. wrung concessions from unions by threatening to close the papers they own, Murdoch may be looking to extract some kind of licensing deal from Google in return for backing down.

The Journal and the Financial Times are the only two daily newspapers that are having any success with a paid subscription model because both provide information that subscribers see as essential to their business. Few other newspapers can make that claim, which is why paywalls have been so difficult to implement.

Miller’s comment about drive-by visitors is worth noting. Publishers and auditors tend to look at traffic as the ultimate metric of success, but there are different kinds of traffic. Sex and celebrities drive page views just as they sell newsstand copies, but that kind of traffic is undesirable to most advertisers and extremely hard to monetize. If Murdoch has decided that his core base of paying and print subscribers are sufficient to run the company, he may be choosing to press his advantage while he still has leverage. The Wall Street Journal was the only large US newspaper to show any growth in the recent Audit Bureau Of Control report and Murdoch may have decided that he doesn’t need the casual visitor in order to be successful.

The Bing Factor

Media entrepreneur Jason Calacanis thinks Murdoch wants to do a deal. He suggests that the publishing tycoon could strike an exclusive deal with Microsoft Bing. This would have the win-win effect of driving revenue from Microsoft’s deep pockets while also upping the ante in the search wars. It’s an intriguing idea, and few other companies have the throw weight to pull it off.

Bing presents an interesting twist. TechCrunch reported last week that Microsoft held a secret meeting with representatives of some of Europe’s largest newspapers to discuss throwing its weight behind ACAP, a protocol that provides a variety of access controls over content. TechCrunch says Microsoft told the European publishers that it’s ready to commit £100,000 to fund development of ACAP, which permits search engines, for example, to index the full content of an article while displaying only part of it to a casual visitor. The report speculates that Microsoft may be hoping to use publishers as allies in a flank attack on Google by striking deals that give Bing exclusive or semi-exclusive access to their content.

Writer: Paul Gillin