CEO Corner

A UK property portal research company, Global Edge, along with the US site ranking company, SEOmoz, have team together to rank 50 of the most popular English language property portal sites around the world.

The results for the REA Group were fantastic with www.realestate.com.au coming in at #4 (behind Zillow, Trulia and move.com), www.propertyfinder.com coming in at #5 and hotproperty.co.uk coming in at #11.  Not bad!

Globaledge didnt test all the REA Group's URL's however this relatively small sample shows just how well the REA Group is going. 

Check out the full article at http://www.globaledge.co.uk/news/details/property-portals:-the-50-most-powerful-websites/21908

Posted by at 12:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today we launched a new version of the www.propertyfinder.com website.  Three months in the making, this new site does away with the old left hand navigation, reduces the clutter on the site and makes it a far more enjoyable experience for the consumer.

 

The new site design was based on extensive consumer research and has been optimised to provide agents with more leads.

Why dont you check out the new site.

Posted by at 05:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Recently the REA Group, through its UK business Propertyfinder.com, acquire the UK based site www.ukpropertyshop.co.uk.

Who is UKPropertyShop?

UKPropertyShop is one of the UK's largest (probably largest) directories of estate agents serving the UK market.  The underlying model for the site is that it is a lead generator for agents.

If you go to the site, you can search for an agent (residential, lettings or even focused on student accomodation) that services your area.  Once you have done a search in the area you are looking, you can send an enquiry to the agents serving that area.  Now the system will automatically select those agents that have paid for a lead and will then send these agents a lead from you.  You can also send the same lead to other agents in the suburb just be clicking on their name.

The site lists around 18,000 agents serving the UK market.  Around 500 agents have bought a subscription to the site to ensure that they are automatically selected to receive leads and to make sure that their brand is displayed as well.

The good news is that between 500,000 and 600,000 people visit the UKPropertyShop site each month generating around 70,000 leads for the agents each month.

How does UKPropertyShop fit with www.propertyfinder.com and www.hotproperty.co.uk?

THe underlying strategy for the Propertyfinder group is to provide multiple ways for a consumer to find the properties of agents who have purchased a subscription.  Therefore if an agent buys a subscription, their listings will appear on www.propertfinder.com (and its network of distribution partners inclunding MSN UK, AOL and Tiscali), www.hotproperty.co.uk and www.ukpropertyshop.co.uk.  In addition, the agents purchasing a Propertyfinder.com subscripton will also get a free upgrade on UKPropertyshop.co.uk and therefore generate more leads.

All leads generated will be branded as www.propertyfinder.com leads.

The Propertyfinder network of sites in the UK is second in traffic to only Rightmove (www.rightmove.co.uk).

Let me know what you think.

Posted by at 02:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I am pleased to announce that the REA Group has increased its stake in casa.it, the leading real estate portal site in Italy.  The Group has acquired an additional 10% of casa.it from its founder, Antonio Fregnan, and therefore increased its stake in casa.it from 59.4% to 69.4%. 

The remaining 30.6% continues to be owned by Italy's leading pay TV company, Sky Italia. 

Posted by at 08:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Today the REA Group received a great write up by Joel Burslem from the Future of Real Estate Marketing Blog.

Check out his entry http://www.futureofrealestatemarketing.com/company-to-watch-rea-group.

 

Thanks Joel

Posted by at 08:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The REA Group's 50% owned United Kingdom subsidiary, Propertyfinder Holdings Ltd (www.propertyfinder.com), has just acquired Sherlock Publications Ltd for £5.6m (A$12m).

Sherlock Publications owns and operates the UK’s sixth largest property website, www.hotproperty.co.uk.  The site is used by 1,300 paying real estate agencies to advertise 170,000 listings. In addition, Sherlock Publications publishes the popular Hotproperty, Renting and Overseas, print publications with a combined monthly circulation of 120,000.

It is planned to run the propertyfinder.com and hotproperty.co.uk websites in parallel with estate agencies having their listings appear on both sites for the subscription price of just one of the sites.  At acquisition, there are over 5,500 unique real estate agencies advertising 400,000 listings on the www.propertyfinder.com and/or www.hotproperty.co.uk sites. 

Once the sites are linked, subscribing real estate agents will automatically expose all their listings to over 2 million unique visitors on propertyfinder.com and 400,000 unique visitors on hotproperty.co.uk. 

The Hotproperty, Renting and Overseas print publications will be brought under the Propertyfinder Publications business unit that is responsible for the publication of the London Property News magazines, which reach over 250,000 readers each month.

Posted by at 12:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As many of you know, we have added video content to the http://www.realestate.com.au site.  You can check it out at http://www.realestate.com.au/cgi-bin/rsearch?a=localityDirectory .

Now when we launched this suburb based video content, we had in mind that it would help home buyers understand more about the areas that they are moving to and therefore provide them with a much better user experience on the site.

However, we received an email a few weeks ago from a recruitment company that has been using our suburb video guides to help them recruit doctors from overseas.  Here is part of the email ...

Hi, we just want to say how grateful we are for your new video links to suburbs and towns around Australia. We recruit Doctors from overseas into positions all over Australia and one of the hardest parts of our job is to "sell the location". We usually send them a whole heap of web links and as much local information as we can (including Realestate.com.au) as our service is quite an all-encompassing one, where we actually seek out rental properties for them as well.  

Your video links have revolutionised that part of our service, as it is so much better for a candidate to 'see' the sites of a city that they are going to travel half way across the world to relocate to, rather than read or hear about it. 

It's also wonderful that you are adding cities to the list all the time.

Who would have guessed that this would be a use of our video content on the site.

Posted by at 11:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last week the REA Group launched its newest website - www.athomealsace.fr.

This site operates in the Alsace region of France and on launch, had 25% of the listings in the region on the site.

The question I am asked is why don't you have a France-wide website.  The answer is simple.  We don't want to take on the incumbent, Seloger, directly as this would be a huge resource strain.  Rather we want to focus on a number of regions - Lorraine and Alsace are two of them - and make sure that we establish a strong position in each of these markets.

What makes these two regions attractive is that there is a large number of peope who commute each day to Luxembourg for work.

The www.athomealsace.fr site is part of the atHome group operating out of Luxembourg.  The group has sites operating in Belgium (www.athome.be), Luxembourg (www.athome.lu), Germany (www.athome.de) and the Lorraine Region of France (www.athomelorraine.fr).

Posted by at 01:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last week the team at www.realestate.com.au released a new innovation ... the ability to display any property that you are intereted in on your Facebook page.

Check out my page facebook page (http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=685074364) and you can see that i have listed a property from Richmond as being one that i am interested in.  Friends of mine that use facebook can now see this listing, click on it, and go straight to the full listing on realestate.com.au.

It is simple to make this happen.  Conduct a normal search on www.realestate.com.au, when you find a place you are intereted in, click on the Share on Facebook link at the top right and then enter your facebook userid and password.  It is that simple.

So why are we doing this?  Well millions of people use facebook each day and we thought it would be good to allow our customers and their members to share the same information. 

If you get a chance, check it out.

Posted by at 10:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We had great news overnight with the The Connells Group starting to advertise on www.propertyfinder.com. 

So who is the The Connells Group?  They are the UK's second largest real estate chain.  They have  600 offices nationally and are now displaying over 37,000 listings on www.propertyfinder.com.

The Connells Group operates under 15 different brands through out the United Kingdom.

• Brown & Merry
• William H Brown
• Barnard Marcus
• Bagshaws Residential
• Manners & Harrison 
• Sequence
• Fox & Sons
• Swetenhams
• Roger Platt
• Shipways
• Allen & Harris
• Jones & Chapman
• First Time Buyers Centre
• Connells
• Atkinson Stilgoe

Well done to our UK team for getting this great deal across the line.

 

Posted by at 07:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)