A look around the World for real estate agent websites shows that the best agent real estate sites in Australia if anything are ahead of the rest of them. However the majority of Real Estate Agents websites fall well below the standards we all should aspire to and that my friends is standards based web development. In fact real estate agents websites that are not standards based will fall behind over the next 5 years.
The USA Market is getting attacked fairly heavily because of the way property historically always been sold.
In most cases to buy from a real estate agency you would need to engage with a buyers agent. With the selling agent taking 3% and the buyers agent taking 3% it has established itself as a lucrative industry and it is under attack.
I spent a few hours looking at agents websites and on the whole they are deplorable. If I see another Tammie Faye Baker look alike I will not be able to eat again for quite some time. Some of the traditional portals such as realtor.com (think Real Estate Institute of America) have around 3 million homes for sale.
However the market is being attacked by innovative solutions such as Redfin and Zillow and Trulia. There are also many speciality sites such as City Cribs and Home Values.
Home Valuations is a big industry and companies like RPData have done very well over the years. I believe REA Australia currently has a contract to supply agents sales data to RPData and this expires soon, so expect to hear an announcement on this in the next year or so. This could be another revenue bonanza for REA or Domain.
In the US you consumers can search for sales data for up to 60 million homes for free on Home Values and there are many new innovations coming our way. Does anyone know of other innovative websites?