2007 The Year ahead

13 minute read

Trying to predict what will happen this year will be harder than ever with new entrants coming thick and fast. However I have dusted off the crystal ball and here are some of my thoughts!

INTERNET ACCESS
With the NSW State Government proposing a blanket wireless coverage of Sydney for FREE wireless Internet will be the norm and Internet companies (Bigpond etc) will have to lift their game and offer more and more value added services to stay on top. Look for other State Governments to announce similar plans to stay on top and to woo businesses! ADSL 2 will also become the norm with speeds of 24 mps across all major cities.

WIMAX
The new wireless ‘N’ standard will gain a foothold with Intel making all computers processors out of the box with the new ‘N’ standard. This will aid Wireless Internet provider Unwired who Intel have invested heavily in. and hamper companies that have rejected this standard such as Telstra (who have gone for their own proprietary standard). Wireless Internet will change the way agents operate in the future. At this point in time it pays to have offices in key regions but the future will be all about mobility and agents sales/property management staff make their money on the road, not sitting in an office.

VIDEO
With apologies to all of the technology companies making VR tours, these will be on their way out in 2007 and will be replaced by video tours. With the new Windows Vista Movie Maker and Apples’ already sophisticated yet simple to use iMovie software packages, even my mother could make a professional tour (well she couldn’t because she would get distracted and shop on ebay!). I actually have purchased a Mac and made a movie with sound effects, photos and video in less than 20 minutes (once I had all the source materials).

I will post a movie sample here soon to show you how easy and professional this looks.

MAPPING
2006 will be remembered as the year we were introduced to real mapping in real estate. As this technology matures we will see more and more features added to this. Spyk, Realmap and other new entrants like the smaller feedmehomes will push the major portals to advance their rather ordinary mapping offerings to new heights. There will be at least another 5 sites with mapping this year, but the only way for these companies to succeed is to join forces!

REAL ESTATE INSTITUTES
Real Estate Institutes will do nothing, oh, except what they have always done and post press releases telling the world how the market is turning and how there are ‘good signs’ of boom times ahead. Just business as usual for them! I am sorry I am so hard on them, but let’s be honest they do need to get their act together as a group or just give way to an organisation that too the time to understand the needs of agents.

NEWSPAPERS
Is this the year that newspapers finally become FREE? With pretty much all of Australia now searching for jobs, realestate and cars online, newspapers have had to find new ways of making money (note the increase of lift-outs and magazines) If profits continually slide from a market that had 20+ years of continual growth in revenues) then will will see FREE newspapers with donations going to news agencies! Remember they make most of their money from advertisers and they need readership results. Maybe 2007 is too early, but they will get desperate soon!

Maybe they will drop pathetic desperate advertising as well. “Sunday isn’t Sunday without the Daily Telegraph”……..ummmm, yes it is!

Footnote: One of the major Sydney Papers has dropped its price by 10 cents, will not make a difference but is this a first since deregulation in the early 80’s?
MEASUREMENT
Realestate.com.au (REA) and Domain.com.au have now seemingly split from Nielson Netratings with Domain favouring their own statistical polling through Roy Morgan. If Domain no longer carried code from Nielson Netratings it would cause great confusion and frustration for REA . Look for both parties to pick and choose statistics that make them look good and follow up with media releases telling you the same. Of course you can just tell who is better by looking at your results (if you are with both)

Realestate.com.au seem to be pushing that Neilson Netratings IS the standard. I cannot understand how a system that only measures around 15 real estate sites of out 5000+ is a standard.
REALESTATE.COM.AU
Early 2006 saw this company on an acquisition hunt and by mid year had either launched or purchased no fewer than 3 companies. 2007 will be a little of the same but they will have to keep the eye on the ball locally as there are some sharks in the water.

new stuff
Look to see the website increased in width to true 1024 pixels (now becoming a standard) a new commercial site and system, more acquisitions and a ramping up of their Hubonline offering. I really don’t think we will see any new stuff, however we might see support for videos later in the year. Look to see the site become more standards compliant over the year with pressure from search engines and a benefit to users (RSS, XML etc).

digital tv
They could also release a new TV station alongside a network that was 100% real estate (residential and commercial), which would be a good thing for the industry and possibly hugely profitable and popular within Australia. I have said for years now that the possibility of coming home and flicking through properties on your tv – streamed from the Internet is the future!

hubonline
Realestate.com.au purchased this company mid 2006 and has been busily re-building the software, late November they started contacting agencies with special offers to have their website built and managed with them (including my clients). However, for them to gain any traction with this product they would have had to rebuild it from scratch as the websites produced by these were pretty ordinary and relied heavily on frames (which you can read about here) I would go as far as to say that they would need to re-build just about every frames based site (which I am sure they will get their 300 + clients to pay for). So if REA”s Hubonline product is to have any success then the frames based system will have to be dumped to a more standards based offering. Another problem many agents will have is the proposition that all of their eggs will be in REA’s basket. No matter how much love they profess to have for their agents, they love money as well (most do) and are accountable to hungry shareholders and of course there is News Ltd and from memory they love money too!
Please Note: I compete with this company and I have tried to be as objective as possible. If you do a Google Search for “why frames are bad” there are thousands of articles supporting this from leading usability experts such as Jakob Neilson and other experts like Karl Groves. The reason why frames were popular in the past were because a developer could basically give everyone the same website by just changing some logos and colours around as the frames hold navigation information and outside these frames comes the websites content (ie property data).

Few companies have websites developed in frames any more and hopefully this companies new product has dumped this in the new version.

DOMAIN
Domain.com.au needs a leg-up and if the truth be known, they had a big opportunity last year to make a difference. They were the first of the major portals to add mapping (remember many smaller companies added this feature first) and in 2006 they also released a new website.

Unfortunately both of them pretty much bombed although the different types of mapping did make a bit of a difference and forced REA to do the same. They also released a new pricing regime, which is weighted by the regions in which your office resides (city pays more than country) the net result of which basically means all agencies got a price increase.

So what will Domain do in 2007. I really am struggling to see how they can increase their share. For one thing only 5 photos per property has long been a pretty pathetic and they must do something about this. Maybe a Digital TV network. Really the only thing they can do this year is only possible after Fairfax has been purchased.

The site is cleaner than realestate.com.au’s and this is a good start, maybe they can build on this to provide the best portal – add videos – add up to 26 photos and create the best listing service in Australia.

I really do hope they surprise me as I know a few good people there that want to make it work. They are still easily number 2 in the market and do dominate some areas. Aggressive pricing and adding new features for agents can help their cause.

Note: For all of the people that continually write to me saying that I favour realestate.com.au over domain, to me this is nonsense as Domain poses no threat to my business whilst realestate.com.au through their Hubonline product do pose a threat! The best result for me would be that domain.com.au (or someone else) created a real threat!

MYHOME
PBL’S (Channel 9) new offering is perhaps the most exciting offering to come into the market in recent times. I get more excited about smaller offerings but rarely are these from companies that can get their product out there quickly like PBL or MSN can.

Do not expect anything revolutionary with this portal, I am more interested in how it will be marketed, will it force vendors to ask that question “we must be on myhome” which will bring even the naysayer agents on-board or will it be a massive chest thumping release with little to no substance?
They have made no contact with my company in relation to sending my agents property data from my system, so maybe they will lock the smaller players like myself out – this would seem to be a silly move as smaller companies like myself do total over 1000 agencies across Australia. My feeling is they will engage us later.

As for agencies, private agents seem to have been left out of their initial strategy but the success of the site will be with the smaller agents – so they had better wise up quickly as it already has had an affect on the thinking of smaller agencies.

Doing a major launch and only having 50% or less of the listings of realestate.com.au and domain will not work. Just look at Sensis and their search engine, 10’s of millions of dollars were poured into marketing and yet consumers only went there once and found no new great experience that was promised, and all just returned to Google. After all of this Sensis has less than 1% of the search market.

MyHome must provide consumers with a reason to abandon these other portals and to me the digital arm of Ninemsn has got to get smart with this portal.

If NineMSN site is an example, it will fail miserably. Because the site has so much junk on it, it freezes the browser as it loads advertising. Throwing ads all over our screen will also be a big no no but this portal does not seem to realise this. In my opinion this site would be nowhere if it wasn’t for the fact it is preloaded as default page with all versions of Windows.

So how will it look? Like any other portal I imagine, it does not have a choice. How it lays the site out may be a little different but in essence it will be the same as Domain and Real Estate but with less listings.

The first 6 months will be important in shaping its future and they will know this, expect a blitz on TV in PBL magazines and expect TV shows to push vendors to your door asking the questions.

End result, you will probably join!

JUST LISTED
The Justlisted.com.au website and system closed down for around 14 days recently for an upgrade (I thought only crappy little developers did this) and wow, was I blown away when they relaunched recently, it is amazing what they have done. You guessed it, nothing, yes nothing, nothing has changed, still the worst example of a real estate portal I have ever seen and the system is without doubt a great partner for the site! So kudos to all the technicians and designers at Sensis for blowing us away yet again, the only thing that could top it would be a 20 million dollar advertising campaign announcing the new site!

Note: How can a company be taken seriously when it has to shut a site down for 14 or so days? That would spell the end for many web companies! I suppose when you are free and ordinary and no one cares then it doesn’t matter! Harsh you say? Not nearly enough is my response!
SMALLER PLAYERS
We will see many new smaller entrants into the market this year and not with too much success, primarily because agencies do not have national representation, particularly private agencies.

This year will see at least 4 entrants into the property search engine type market and another one emailed me this morning. These will gather listing data off property sites an portals and index them in specific search engines, not much brain power and very effective.

However one large portal (yet to be confirmed) have already started blocking certain spiders and robots from indexing, which the ACCC could be interested in. If you allow sites such as Google and MSN to index your pages and block smaller ones, it could open a legal can of worms.

RSS and OPEN STANDARDS
Ok, this is a wish, I hope all agents get to understand how important open standards will be to the future of the Internet. Having websites that feed data to whoever is interested is a great idea. Yes some people will say they want control over where their data is positioned, but to me having your data (correctly presented) on as many sites as possible can only be good for your vendors.

COMMERCIAL SITES
There will be some major releases from the big boys this year with new sites released. The eyesore (and click sore) realcommercial will be replaced by something that resembles a usable website and it will be a year which sees domain commercial pull all stops out to be the number one in this category. There is room for a new player here, but I just don’t know if anyone can be bothered now.

So please tell me your thoughts for 2007!