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)