Hot on the heels of their acquisition of Propertylook, realestate.com.au have opened the wallet yet again and purchased HubOnline Global for A$6 million.
HubOnline provide solutions for real estate agents to list their properties and have this data exported to all major portals in Australia. HubOnline Global’s client list is impressive with over 500 agency offices across Australia using their system for sales, marketing and lead generation.
Simon Baker (CEO Real Estate) said in a press release today that “we believe that there is an opportunity to move beyond online advertising by providing our 10,500 customers across Australia, NZ and the UK with a market leading sales, lead management and marketing application. This will make it easier for agents to do business and help them drive greater revenues at lower costs’.
My Take
A smart move by realestate.com.au, this acquisition gives the web development side of realestate.com.au a boost and also stops one of their competitors from doing the same. This acquisition is not about boosting listings, it is about enhancing their web development capabilities and generating more revenues for this arm. I spoke with Simon Baker this morning and he thinks this will be an important boost for his company.
The realestate.com.au web development division (2500 agents) will be merged into HubOnline and whilst it may be a few months before this system is rolled out and marketed to current real estate member agencies , I have no doubt this will be the case.
The system exports its listings to a number of portals including realestate.com.au’s major competitor, domain.com.au and I see no reason why this will not continue.
My feeling is that by offering a full system to agents across Australia, New Zealand and the UK they can generate a new stream of revenues.
I still think that many agents will be nervous about putting all of their eggs in the one basket by giving realestate.com.au control over all of their Internet marketing.
There are a number of similar systems out their including my own,…. agentpoint, MyDesktop and Portplus but Hubonline certainly has the biggest client list.
5 Comments
Victoria Agent
Who cares about what you have to say realestateview.com.au is easily the best real estate portal in Australia, more agents should use this instead of News Limited’s money hungry realestate.com.au. And anyways you think you know so much about all of this how come you cannot build your own national portal hey?
peter
Thank you for your nice message and compliments. Yes, realestateview has some success in Victoria and I do know of a handful of agents that are happy with the site and the enquiries it brings these agents. However the Internet is ruled by consumers and NOT News Limited, Fairfax or any other company. So when it comes to popularity – consumers vote with their clicks and realestate.com.au dominates this space at the moment.
But this is the great thing about the Internet. Someday someone may well come up with something that challenges these big companies (by the way News Limited only owns a shade over 50% of realestate.com.au).
As for me developing my own National Portal, I may very well do this in the future, but you have to understand, building a great system/website is only part of the mountain one must climb. Firstly you need agents to list on this portal over a sustained period of time, more than likely NOT getting results in the short term (difficult), secondly you need consumers to know about the portal by spending a large amount of money on marketing a site over a long period of time (even more difficult).
I do not have the confidence in agents being bothered advertising on a site they may get no benefit from for a long period of time and secondly I do not have the budget (got a spare million anyone?) to let the consumers know about it.
Also I do not see such a site getting any free press from Fairfax or News Limited, so it will be a hard slog for anyone.
But watch out for Sensis, PBL and possibly Rural Press. Although I do not see any of these being any different from the others if they get market share.
This is perhaps why the realestateview.com.au website has struggled getting anywhere outside of Victoria.
Another Victoria Agent
If realestateview was so good more agents would be using it, slam dunk.
It was a great idea but not working out so well it seems.
If The REINSW joined in it would have been a great success but no, they decided it was best to let Realestate.com sucker all their agents in return for an annual fee to pay for all their fancy lunches, well done fellas, you incompetant bunch of lackwits………err sorry got carried away there.
If Victoria Agent thinks realestateview is the best portal I’d hate to be taking real estate advice from him/her/it
If the Institutes around Australia were remotely competant there would be a national portal for all Institute Members that worked.
They aren’t and there isn’t , how furtunate for the jackels that cleaned up and are continuing to clean up at expense of thousands of Australian real estate agents.
peter
Another Victorian Agent: Well placed comments. I can actually remember when I went to a seminar for REIT (sponsored by realestate.com.au) and I left feeling a little disturbed at the information being fed to the agents. I suppose if I had been realestate.com.au I probably would have said the same things. Unfortunately Real estate Institutes do not know the Internet as well as they should.
However I have said this many times before, unless agents start taking control of their own destiny in relation to the Internet, their Internet spend will be controlled by major players.
As for realestateview.com.au it may be partly industry owned and operated but it is also owned by some private interests, my feeling is they will sell out to one of the majors in the coming years, but again the technology used would need a total overhaul.
I really do not see anyone challenging realestate.com.au in the near future, but I do know of some interesting developments by a number of companies, however as I am involved with one of them I cannot comment at this stage but look for a July 2006 press release.
snoop
Surely the Institutes should focus on professional development and compliance rather than spending large amounts of members money developing listings portals?
What should the role of insitutes be in the readers view?