If you have not already tried Google Base, then you should at least be getting ready for it. Over the next 6-18 months we will see a local version of Google Base (maybe sooner) and with the Google Base results included in the natural search results on the Google Search Engine in Australia and New Zealand we will see the landscape slowly shift over the years from paying to free listings.
REA and Domain will be offering longer term contracts at a reduced annual rise, but this will come under more pressure over the next few years and here is why.
Google Base will allow for developers to create property websites (mash-ups) of the exact data that is posted onto Google Base. I know of a few in development at the moment including http://baseestate.com and another which I was showcased in confidence last week.
These sites will pop up all over the country once Google Base launches here be it an Apartments website, Holiday Letting, Waterfront, Commercial, Regional Based and even down to suburb based mash-up portals.
The key to this is that if Agents supply the data to Google Base, then the data is simply replicated, this means if the feeds are set up correctly then agents will see their ads appear exactly as they have presented them and best of all any link visits will link back to agents sites directly.
Over the past 18 months we have seen many entrants into the real estate online portal market, all hoping to share in the billion dollar advertising spend, perhaps they have all got it wrong and the money will not come their way.
Jobs, cars and houses have for decades been the rivers of gold for the major newspapers, the last decade has seen the rise of the big portal players owned predominantly by the big media players, maybe the next decade will see control going back to the agents themselves and this presents an interesting conundrum for major media companies whose bottom line is driven by the need for revenue growth to satisfy impatient shareholders.
The upper management of these organisations have to really get it right over the next 10 years. My opinion is that it will become increasing hard to charge real estate agents to list on portals once they see results filtering in from FREE sites such as Google, Yahoo and MSN with their LiveExpo.