Simon Baker, the ex-CEO of REA has invested in bringing the Nestoria property portal to Australia. Nestoria.co.uk is the 4th most popular real estate site in the UK.
There are some interesting connections going on here. Firstly Nestoria is an aggregator of property listings. They receive listing data from a range of other companies. Ultimately they are just a listing service for other portals and real estate groups to display their property on. They compete for the eyeballs looking for real estate and then distribute them to other “destination”.
They specialise in creating a better and more simplified user experience. Nestoria also offers a range of widgets and an api for third party webmasters to utilise their data and embed functionality in their website ultimatley driving traffic back to Nestoria.
If this all sounds familiar it is and that’s because it is basically Google’s model to Real Estate although there are of course still some differences. Nestoria’s user interface is far better than Google’s minimalistic mapping approach but Google also brings synergies with its search integration that Nestoria can’t offer. Another difference is that Google’s income stream is through the display of ads on every page whereas I believe Nestoria is charging the data providers for generating traffic.
Now Domain has signed up as one of the foundation partners for Nestoria. That seems a little hypocritical when you consider that Domain has not partnered with Google over their real estate solution. Domain obviously does not have an issue with the aggregation model itself more the fact that Fairfax is a huge user of Google for its advertising products and thus they believe it should not be interfering in their “space”. Clearly they dont have those issues with Nestoria.
So what we have is the ex CEO and still a major shareholder of the Australian number one portal doing a joint venture (or white labelling) with the UK’s 4th largest portal to create a new Australian portal and partnering with Australia’s 2nd largest portal and others to generate them more traffic. Confused yet?
Something has obviously changed in Simon Bakers thinking. As the man behind REA’s stunning success he operated a strictly subscription based portal that now talks about increasing their “share of wallet” from real estate agents. At the end of Simons reign at REA it was a truly corporate beast complete with executive and middle management levels and a huge administration and sales force.
Nestoria on the other hand is a lean mean fighting machine that operates on minimal overheads and uses smart user friendly design and SEO to create substantial traffic.
Only days before Google launched the first stage of their Real Estate solution Simon was publicly stating on his propertyportalwatch.com blog that Google would not be effective and not enter the mix. In contrast we have him behind a remarkably similar portal whose current partnerships are actively working against his previous employer and his substantial investment in REA.
So can Simon Baker make Nestoria.com.au a real contender in the real estate space? Yes I think he can.
Nestoria certainly has a good pedigree and an established and proven site design, user interface combined with widgets and an api. Simon also brings a wealth of experience to the table and the combination should certainly provide some fireworks.