Realestate.com.au have released a new website design and first impressions,…well they impress! It is so much cleaner than their last site with information well positioned and advertising, whilst noticeable – is not in visitors faces nearly as much.
Having spent about an hour going through the site, I must say the designers did an excellent job. A site like this is fraught with many dangers, mainly because it has just so much information to display. So with this in mind they have done a wonderful job!
The dual menu system works well and the site is noticeably cleaner throughout.
Google – Maybe a little too clever!
However from a developer point of view, not much thought has been placed with the Google Algorithms. Google in February put on notice any sites that create links pages for the sole purpose of attracting the Google search engine results. Realestate.com.au have done this in spades throughout the site, particularly when you click on the real estate directory. This could have dire consequences if it is picked up by the Google Team. It has long been seen as a clever way to create extra pages from the Google Search Engine.
I once tried this myself and had resounding success until they found out and then bang!!! My pages started disappearing from results. Under one such search term (my main one) I went from number one in Google to page fifty five. Since then I learnt my lesson and decided to stick to the sensible approach.
I wrote to Google about this and they explained some things to me, if the page goes somewhere for the user and it has the information displayed as promised then there will be no problem, however if the page goes nowhere or just displays the same text on multiple pages then it could be blacklisted. Not a smart move!
Agents
The second thing I noticed was that you can no longer search for agents from the main menu, this is now hidden within the real estate directory – This will not make too many agents (they have to know) happy as it is nearly impossible to work out how to find (it took me about 10 minutes).
Sold Properties
The Sold Properties section I think is developed to ward off realestateview.com.au, as they are in deep negotiations with all of the real estate institutes across Australia to provide sold data and this has been seen by many institutes as an advantage.
Currently the system only shows that the property is sold and shows the advertised price, which is more often higher than the actual sold price.
Integrity of sales data is important, because potential vendors could tell agents “well that property sold for this amount, so I should get this for my house which is better”. This will annoy agents no end.
However it is the right approach. Agents across Australia usually have to pay fees to get accurate sales results for recently sold properties and if this works (it has to be nearly 100% accurate to do so) then it could be a good thing for agents. Hopefully if agents do provide results, they will be accurate.
Vendors could also get upset that prices are advertised that they did not receive. I have had discussions with my agents and there major concern is privacy, something realestate.com.au surely would have thought about.
All in all a positive step forward.
