Yesterday I met with domain.com.au State Manager John Beshara and we had a lively passionate conversation about the real estate industry and the direction of domain.com.au . I have met with John before and we both enjoy a passion for the industry. John is a former agent who has been working with Domain.com.au for a number of years now.
ZONED PRICING
John explained his companies policy of zoned pricing with me and whilst I can understand in principal what they are trying to do, I still have reservations about how it will effect agents. In simple terms agencies in built up metropolitan areas will pay a higher fee than agencies in country areas.
All areas pricing will rise nominally and he did explain how a very small percentage of companies actually had not had a price increase for a number of years and these companies will think they have had a large increase, however he took time to explain to me that this was a rare occurance.
QUALITY OF LISTINGS
We spoke about all manner of things effecting the industry and one of the main topics of conversation was the quality of listings. I believe that many real estate agencies need to improve the standard of advertising online both with text copy and also photography. This to me will be the key differentiator between agents going forward in an online world. It is easy to show a potential vendor the difference in quality between you and your competitor, with text information and photography. Many agents today contract outside photographers to do all their images and virtual tours at about $300 a pop! However for some this is just not feasible, but giving your sales or property management team training for use of digital cameras is!
I had a number of ideas on how portals could lift the quality of agency listings, possibly a ratings system for web site users – if you look above this post you can rate my articles from one to five, it could be something that is not seen by the public but effects the order that the listings appear in search results. Agencies could also receive a weekly email with the amount of ratings and the average score for each listing. A simple system that works – the higher the rating the higher these listings will appear in search results.
This makes it hard when you have agents paying for their listings to be higher in search results but in my opinion this would lift the quality of listings immediately and provide a far better user experience both for consumers and for agents.
I WAS WRONG – SO FAR
We spoke for over an hour and I appreciated John’s openness in his discussions with me and I have changed my position somewhat on domain.com.au new pricing system. However I do not want to see prices rise even further and as long as it is clear and easy to understand for agents, I think it will be fine.
Whilst I understand that I am a sometimes writer and he may have been a little guarded, he did open up after a while and we did have some passionate volleys back and forth. John is very confident about Domain.com.au’s position in the market and how they have great strengths in the Sydney and Melbourne markets alongside their classifieds news prints.
PRINT ADVERTISING
John is also confident that print will remain a strong driver and I am not. I think print advertising is close to finished as far as advertising vendor listings, it is fun to sit down and read, but the far greater majority of enquiries now come from the Internet. So the future of print in my opinion has only a few good years left in relation to real estate and from there it will all be about branding for agents (as it is now)
DEVELOPMENT
One thing that amazes me with all of these large companies is the amount of people they have working on these sites. I have always been of the opinion that the more developers you have – the more problems you have. Small dedicated teams makes so much more sense. As an example, you could easily run a nationwide real estate portal with as little as 6 developers. 4 for systems and 2 for the actual website. Having a great interface designer would also be a boon and domain really do need one (and that is intended to be an offence)
One problem all of these real estate portal companies have is developer retention, developers get pretty bored quickly and in recent times have always in demand, so they do tend to lose many of their developers to other companies.
Expect to see a few new features to domain.com.au over the coming months some of which sound very good – time will tell if they work and domain.com.au can start to close the gap on realestate.com.au
So thank you John for taking the time to meet with me and I look forward to hearing more from you!