Nerang Real Estate

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!

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.

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.

Google has just realeased Real Estate Search on their maps and we are pleased to announce that all of Nerang First National‘s properties are up on the site. Users can refine their search by price, type of property, bedrooms, bathrooms, and parking. The map will automatically update with relevant listings when moved around or zoomed into another suburb or when the search criteria is changed. You can view the official Australian Google Real Estate video here: You can check out the Google Real Estate results for Nerang, Carrara, Highland Park and Worongary. In Google’s official press release they said “Increasingly, people are starting their search for a new home online – Nielsen research shows that 87% of Australian home buyers use the internet to research properties*. Google saw more than 35% growth in real estate-related searches from Jan/Feb 2008 to Jan/Feb 2009**.” Over the next few week or months Google will probably integrate the properties in Google Real Estate into the normal Google Search as it has done in other markets around the world. With millions of people using Australian Google Maps daily it is essential that any agency  you consider to market your home is uploading their properties to Google Real Estate Search on Google Maps. Prospective sellers should conduct their own research into the internet presence of every agency they consider to market their property. Nerang First National maintains one Australia’s most successful agency websites attracting record numbers of prospective buyers.

Analysing the real estate market is never easy. Actual sales data takes months to process through solicitors and government databases before its available for real estate agents, jounalists or market commentators to analyse. This is why when you property statistics in the newspaper they are always for earlier in the year.

Nerang First National has for a while now tracked the total number of properties for sale and properties marked “under contract” on the major real estate portals.  Agents are required by law and by the terms and agreements with the portals themselves to have this informaiton accurate. Advertising a property for sale that they do not have an authority on can bring heavy fines and failing to remove properties under contract can see you getting banned from the portals for repeated breaches.

This information is the best indicator of just what is happening in the live in the marketplace. One of the best ways to communicate changing data over time is using a motion graph. The motion graph turns what was once a static graph into an animation as it plays through time so you can see the changes as they happened.

One of the best introductions to Motion Graphs is through Hans Rosling’s statistics presentation to the TED conference.  Hans created the Trendalyzer program which allows pages and pages of data to be easily understood by everybody.  To get a good understanding of how the graphs work check this video out. It will truly blow your mind and show you how the motion graph helps anybody understand complex data.

So using the same type of Motion Graphs we are able to have a look at the local real estate market  for Nerang, Carrara and Highland Park over the past 12 months and some amazing trends stand out. The graph tracks the available property for sale and property under contract in the suburbs of Nerang, Carrara and Highland Park from the beginning of the financial year to now.

Nerang Property Market - Financial Year 2008/2009 Click to Access the Motion Graph

As you watch the graph you will notice the suburb indicators change colour.  This colour is based on the Under Contract rate which is the percentage of properties Under Contract in relation to all properties. In the first 6 months you will notice a lot of properties on the market but very few under contract which results in low conversion rates  that is indicated by a blue or green colouring.

The second half of the year is a different story as the number of properties for sale drops rapidly around February and the number of properties under contract skyrocket.  This improves the conversion factor and turns the icons orange and red.

There is certainly different activity levels through different price ranges and property types, but if you are thinking about selling or are on the market at the moment and somebody is telling you how tough the market, maybe they are living in the past.

Contact the sales team at Nerang First National on 07 55960055

Augmented reality (AR) is the combination of real world images and computer generated graphics to create a combined or virtual world. This may sound far fetched but Augmented reality is available right now on some of the latest smartphones.  One of the first Augmented Reality programs available for on a phone was a travel guide.  If you are in the middle of Rome and you have lost your pocket travel guide  you can now fire up Wikitude on your mobile which overlays travel information live on your screen.

Check out this video.

Now a Dutch company has brought out Layar which is an Augmented Reality browser for your Google Android phone.  This allows you to overlay property for sale  on live images from your camera.  View all property for sale around your exact position that meet your search criteria, view photos for sale, detailed property information and ring the agent all from an augmented reality property browser on your phone.

Whilst it is still a little while before you are able to find Nerang First National property listings through AR and your mobile phone it is available right now in parts of Europe and will quickly expand around the world. It just goes to show that with regard to technology we may have come a long way already, but there is still a long way to go.

Nerang First National has just completed a major upgrade to our network and company servers.  Technology plays a very important role in our agency and we are considered by many to be one of the real estate industry’s leading innovators regarding technology in Australia. We are extremely proud that procedures, policies, systems and software that we developed in house are now in operation right through Australia in hundreds of offices including all the major real estate groups.

The upgrade included the installation of two new servers featuring the just released Microsoft Small Business Server 2008 Premium edition. This edition offers improved functionality, speed and performance over previous editions and Nerang First National engaged the expert team at IT Leaders to design, build and implement the new network including migration of the existing client and property databases, CRM systems and other software packages.

The nearly $30,000 investment in computer hardware leverages the recent installation of a $40,000+ Cisco Integrated Services Router which handles voice, data and video networking throughout the office.

But Real Estate is a service industry and so at the end of the day it is really how these new systems allow us to better service our clients and customers.

Computers allow us to share information and collaborate in real time and the latest version of the company intranet is built on Microsoft Sharepoint technology which allows increased productivity in the workplace by all sales, property management and administration team members.  Increased productivity produces better results for our clients.

Sometimes its the simple things like improved communication. We don’t have internal paper forms in the office as all forms completed digitally. In fact we dont even have telephone messages pads as we run the latest Jabber Instant Messaging System in the office allowing team members to send messages, transfer files and share information in a secure environment.  Vital messages are never jotted down on scraps of paper to be misplaced and all messages are logged for future retrival.

The intranet is the central information hub in the office and policies, clauses, annexures, procedures, manuals, photographs, adverts, window cards and much much more are kept on the intranet for quick and immediate access by all staff. Even proofing all advertising throughout the office these days is a totally digital process now so there is no more scribbled notes in the margins or handwriting to decipher.

All salespeople have their own direct phone number and voicemail of course, but like most successfull salespeople they spend much of their time out of the office. Should they receive a call on their office phone and they are not in the office to take it the voicemail can be forwarded automatically to their home email or even their mobile phone.

Microsoft SBS 2008 also provides the latest version of Remote Web Workspace which provides staff members with remote access to the company intranet, office voicemail, email, appointments, tasks no matter which computer they use or where they are located.  Salespeople can securely access this information from their mobile phones, laptops, home computer or even a clients own desktop computer. In fact a salesperson can even remotely access and operate their desktop computer from any location in the world should it be necessary.

The sales team are even using wireless broadband on their own laptops and tablets to maintain a secure virtual private network connection to the office no matter where they are. This allows salespeople full access to all agency resources on the office network just as though they were sitting at their desk. They can proof adverts with a client sitting on their lounge, conduct buyer demand report from our office database live as they inspect a new appraisal, finalise seller inspection feedback right as the inspection happens and even complete and print a contract in the middle of an open house.

Technology will never replace the real estate agent, but a real estate agency that embraces and masters technology will quickly replace those that don’t.

Nerang First National would like to thank IT Leaders for their exceptional service throughout the process and would highly recommend them if you are looking to upgrade your business network. The installation came in on budget, is performing beautifully as planned and continues to keep the team at Nerang First National ahead of the pack.