Okay, I hear you say not another bloody real estate site, and to be honest at first when I received the information I thought the same. So let’s cast aside all of those thoughts and judge this site on its merits. Luxury Home Australia is independently owned and operated by a former real estate agent
The Brochure
The brochure I received by email was quite beautifully presented. I must give credit to the designers of this as it is well laid out and presented nicely. It has some interesting facts and figures on the growth in premium properties throughout Australia. The site accepts listings over 1 million and costs around $150.00 per month.
The Website
The website is also well laid out, it is not anything spectacular and is by no means revolutionary, but it does what it does well and it looks quite good. Properties are presented nicely and it is reasonably fast and with nice big juicy thumbnails, although only 8 per page. I would like to see RSS Feeds on this site as well as Mapping (Google Yahoo or MSN) as these are becoming standard now. The site is also only 800 pixels wide, which could go to 1024 in this current environment and allow for more information on a page.
The success of this will depend on their systems and of course how popular the site will be over time, clever budgeting of marketing $ will be needed if this is to gain any traction as independents rarely have the big marketing $$$.
Another thing they will need to do is to accept XML feeds from agencies and then simply strip out anything under $1 million. We have seen the failure of Adore, but to be honest I don’t think Fairfax Digital really cared that much about it after it failed to gain any traction in the market place.
The site is here and the brochure can be viewed here. (2.73 megabytes PDF file)
17 Comments
snoop
Yep another Property site
I would have thought it a no brainer for the big two to create a luxury homes channel on the existing sites ,but with no real way to monetise it they prob wont bother.
150 per mth is a fixed cost nobody will want ot pay but one off listings at a reas price could be a go.
That is if they can generate more than 10 ubs a day of course!!
Nat
Dont wanna be too forward, but i think they are putting the horse before the cart with that $150 charge!
Q. What would be the only reason everyone would want to visit luxury homes .com.au ? – because every 1m+ home is listed in it. Other than that, i can’t see any buyer really making the effort to not just go to realestate.com.au to see the same stuff.
Q. Why would i list my agencys properties on luxuryhomes.com.au at this early stage? becuase its free, and only, because it free. Which it is not. So i wont be.
In my opinion, theres only one website that can and should charge for listing your stock, and thats realestate.com.au. (What …over 90% of propeties for sale in aust are listed there – i think i recall)
Luxuryhomes.com.au need to do a bit of work first. And not screen scraping. They need to make phone calls to the premium agents telling us come abord (for free). Without our listings, they are just, as you put it, another bloody real estate site.
🙂 My two cents anyway.
Glenn Batten
I must admit I was a bit under-whelmed. The site works but that is really the best thing you can say for it.. For a site to charge $150pm and to concentrate on luxury homes only it should have something extra… something to set it apart.
In its current form I reckon it might struggle. I mean why as a consumer would you go there. It offers nothing more than http://www.realestate.com.au does but it provides only a tiny subset of the their listings.
Maybe they could offer things like high res photos, high res full screen slideshows, integrated videos, video profiles of the agents, detailed suburb profiles and a bunch of other stuff. There has to be a reason to visit the site.. and right now there isn’t.
They seem to have approached it from the wrong end. Why would an agent want to list on the site??… but the real answer is to look at why would consumers visit the site.. because without visitors generating traffic no sane agent will pay to list their properties on the site and at the moment there does not seem a valid reason for a visitor to use their site over the market leaders.
Best of luck to them.
snoop
Video Profiles of agents that sell expensive properties!!!.
OMG The white shoes,botox,hair gel,platinum hair coloring people would have a field day.
Glenn Batten
It brings about a horrible thought… but I am thinking of more the Propvid style of video profiles.. Have you seen them??
As an example here is quick Agency video profile
http://tsr2.propvid.tv/tsr3/pv/view.php?sc=50c3648e60
the same company’s auction video
http://play.viostream.com/?play=D9D087C4-23BD-4574-AFD4-75495B7D6940
and here is an example of an individual agents profile, although I have seen them do much better ones, but this is something I found quickly.
http://play.viostream.com/?play=2BF2B788-8F92-4531-8DDC-9163B81909B6
snoop
Yes , have bought and sold many high value props over the years.
If an agent turns up in a flashy car looking like a car salesman I tend to test them pretty hard and if they dont perform not to buy from them.
Prefer to support the underdogs and give them a big bonus!!!
And teach them how to negotiate along the way for a bit of fun.
cant say i am the norm though!
cynical old fart that i am.
Jake
*yawn*
LuxuryRealEsate.com (US based) opened up back in 2004 here in Australia, now have 30+ agents and more than 480 listings. One site in this niche is enough.
http://www.luxuryrealestate.com/australia/
PaulD
New websites: I just got a card (in the mail) from a brave new internet site called realestateonly.com.au They will have a long row to hoe. Currently there is one listing in NSW (that I could find) and 19 in Victoria. It must be a Victorian site because it has 19 times as many properties as NSW, or to put it another way, NSW only has 5% as many properties on that site as Victoria does. It doesn’t have any listings in either SA or Qld. so we can’t say how many more gazillion times people are more likely to see properties on this website in Victoria that they are in either SA or Qld.
Robert Simeon
Interesting yet well rehearsed with other portals although somehow (with respect) luxury and $1,000,000 are no longer in unison with the majority of property niche markets.
A this point of time it would appear that some agents wanting to get a piece of the top-end markets could use this portal as a listing tool. However, at the end of the day we all know that vendors require much more than that. Still provides some revenue streams to the owners which ever so slowly will attempt to re-coup costs. Although I must admit a tough ask as it identifies very little points of difference from it’s more logical competitors.
The next step following a launch is the much more difficult test of time where previously many have stood before and now cease to exist. At this point in time from our perspective it is a lukewarm response. I believe it simply struggles to re-inforce that it dares to be different and offers consumers that fuzzy feeling.
Way too much of the old with very little of the new.
Ralph W.
‘The success of this will depend on their systems and of course how popular the site will be over time, clever budgeting of marketing $ will be needed if this is to gain any traction as independents rarely have the big marketing $$$.’
Anyone have any constructive ideas on what would be the most effective marketing strategy for an independent/ small agency site like this one?
Glenn Batten
I just got an email from these guys sprouting HITS.
It has been a long time since anybody used hits as a measure of a websites performance.
I think if they want agents to take their statistics seriously they should provide unique browser figures in line with the other portals. The only problem with this of course is that UB’s may be very unimpressive unlike the using 297,000 hits.
Peter Ricci
Hi Glenn, I called them about this as it was in their PDF brochure about hits as well. I was sure they would get this right.
Glenn Batten
Ralph…
The niche for this site is Luxury.. so a check of the google adwords keywords tool finds a large number of luxury based keywords with good quality traffic but with very little to no competition. Very little competition means they dont have to pay a fortune for each visitor.
As an example “Luxury Homes Sydney”, “Luxury Homes Rent” and “Luxury Beachfront Homes” have good traffic but no competition but a search would find dozens if not hundreds of other keywords that will work with them.
My issue is that they don’t seem to be offering anything different from the competition except LESS property. This will mean that they will pay good money to attract visitors that will not stay long and will not return… which is exactly what happened to Myhome.
They should try and be innovators in the Niche. They dont have to have the most million dollar homes but they have to have the best experience if they want to survive.
Virtually all luxury homes buyers will have broadband and just about all luxury homes will have professional shots so why not have high res photos available so they fill the screen not small 800pix photos.
The could do full screen slideshows such as this (maximise your browser before clicking) http://glennbatten.smugmug.com/photos/sspopup.mg?AlbumID=1578729
Overlay their logo and web address on each photo. Photos of presitge homes are likely to be downloaded and be passed around and used as screen savers so make sure their logo and web address is on each photo.
Once the site gains enough momentum they might be able to dump the adword campaign.
That would be where I would start anyway.
snoop
Question is as a consumer would I search google for luxury homes?
Rob simeon in mosman might shed some light on what his customers search for??
Waterfront ,Jetty,helipad,jaccuzi,staff and nanny accom combos?
Interesting?
I wonder if the keyword bids are low ,are people searching?
Glenn Batten
Snoop..
I think your missing my point. The adwords keyword tool shows search volume and adwords competition for any keyword combination you throw at it plus it provides you with other similar keyword combinations as well. Even if your not interested in adwords you should be using this tool just for its ability to show search volume for specified keywords. They dont actually give you numbers the numbers involved but they provide you with indicators.
People are indeed searching for those terms in quite good numbers and whilst some of them have high competition, many have not.
Finding a range of keywords with low competition would not be that hard, at least at this moment in time. Obviously that is fairly fluid thing.
Brett Clements
We were involved in the luxury site ADORE for Domain. It was, initially, to have been on all video offering but it got lost somewhere between still photographs, virtual tours and self-indulgent locality profiles that resembled more music video than area snapshots. I believe there is room for a high-end luxury home site but I agree it has have some new media differentiators.