Someone at REA has paid attention to the blogs around Australia and the recent improvements by Domain. As REA have just published a press release highlighting current updates to their site.
The new features include:
- Cleaner home page and site design: The realestate.com.au site has been refreshed to give it a cleaner look and feel.
- Improved navigation: The navigation menu has been simplified to drive more people to search your OFI and Auction times
- New page layout for OFI and Auction Times (beta): The new page layout appears in a list format, making it even easier for potential buyers and sellers to see all the upcoming OFI’s and Auctions in their selected suburbs.
- New ‘view results by inspection times’ (beta): The search results page can now be easily filtered by OFI time – property seekers can quickly sort the search results page to order the listings by the date and time of the next Open for Inspection.
The homepage looks a lot crisper with smaller text used for less important areas and JavaScript to control links. It appears they are trying to more easily allow the user to navigate to property pages rather than the non real estate and marketing pages. Adding OFI and Auction Times as an option in property results pages is great for property seekers as they can easily print or short list properties they are interested in viewing.
As indicated in their press release we can expect further updates over the next 12 months. It has been a long time between website updates at REA, which should make the next 12 months a very interesting time.