Telstra (Sensis) has dumped its paper property magazine Just Listed to concentrate solely in the online space. This comes as no real surprise to me and I asked questions about why companies would want to release property guides when agents are turning away from expensive print in droves, especially with a slow down of the property market.
Why?
Well it is quite simple really, paper based property guides are a thing of the past. Poor reach mixed with expensive per line costs are driving many newspaper property guides to the wall and the next few years are going to be especially tough considering the power the Internet has over newspapers in terms of reach and costs.
Others to follow?
Fairfax will continue as will many other established brands but the yearly price increases will not. The ones that will go by the wayside are the realestate.com.au guide. It has been a bold move and one which realestate.com.au are still “testing” the waters with, but management will soon realise that the online space is where their future earnings lie.
The Just Listed Magazine lasted just a little over 12 months. Even back in October 2004 Andrew Day (Sensis Chief Executive Officer) said ““The Just Listed™ magazine is a natural extension to the Sensis Classifieds portfolio and an exciting new addition to the Sensis advertising network,”. “It also increases the breadth of our growing range of specialist vertical products covering automotive (AutoTrader™), general classifieds, (Trading Post®) and lifestyle (CitySearch®).”
Even I was a little excited by this but it turned out to be a bit of a dud.
It is amazing how things change in such a short period of time. Tis is a quote from Sensis the other day…..
“The focus is very much online – we want to be national, online,” Sensis public relations manager Felicity Hand said.
It really makes me laugh how these companies continue to fail but seem to be able to put a positive spin on things.
The Justlisted.com.au website is in desperate need of some inspiration, it is cold, old and has very little information for the buyer, oh and it is still only Sydney based, even though they did say it would be national by the middle of the year. It also does not accept XML feeds (even tiny sites with tiny budgets can do this) and most major franchises work with these types of feeds.
Again Justlisted really do need some talent that understands the Internet if it is ever to be successful.
