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.