We recently had a look at the realestate.com.au BETA but when that was turned off at 5:00pm last Friday it sent a signal that the release of the new version was only around the corner. In fact word soon filtered down that the site will be switched over on the 13th or 14th and realestate.com.au did not dissappoint with the changeover ready for this mornings first visitors.
I reckon realestate.com.au has been a little like a talented friend that we had as children. We all had that friend who was really good at a particular sport, or a specific subject at school. It just seemed to come naturally to them without any effort at all and they frustrated the hell of you just as much as you admired them. No matter how hard you trained or studied you could never ever match what their natural talent and potential provided them. But despite all this they never really became world class and failed to pushed themselves beyond what they had to do to win at the school level.
The realestate.com.au portal has been like this. It’s old and tired and they never really seemed to push any boundaries because they were number one by a clear margin.
Now, I understand the whole concept about not fixing something if its not broken, but despite being the clear leader in the real estate industry online – the realestate.com.au portal has required a much needed overhaul and despite a tart up here and there every few months, it has left most unimpressed.
So, when it was announced that realestate.com.au were working on a major upgrade the industry collectively sighed as one, “it’s about time”. The first shock came when a proper beta test was released. Up till now all updates seemed to have little discussion with agents, buyers and sellers, so the fact that they actively involved people from all three groups to participate in a beta program was a great harbinger of things to come.
Of course they were not going to listen to every bit of feedback they were receiving. During the process one of the most popular complaints as voted by the beta testers themselves was the sheer number of adverts on the site. It would take a fairly massive shift in thinking for the the adverts to disappear.
Anybody testing the site throughout the day today would have been subjected to a number of crashes – however the good news is that these seem to have been reduced significantly by this afternoon as they probably tweaked their servers and adjusted their load balancing.
Because the upgrade was based on totally new code from the ground up it is not surprising that there were a few niggling issues when the new site was upgraded from a few hundred beta testers to the whole shebang.
So whilst we gave you our initial opinions on the BETA test in the coming days and weeks we will give you a range of reviews and opinions from a number of the contributors. If you have checked out the site today whats your initial opinion in a nutshell… dud, master stroke or maybe somewhere in between?
46 Comments
Not a fan
DUD!
Sorry realestate.com.au. It looks pretty but is functional? When you try and improve your site next maybe take a look at what your competitors are doing, and I don’t mean the one other site in australia, Domain. Take a look at the industry leaders like Trulia, Zillow, Zoopla…
Learn from the best in the world and maybe hire some new developers
Greg Vincent
Glenn, they’ve done some clever changes with myrealestate, side by side comparisons & improved search. Good to see the ability to search by property address too.
Having the address search should reduce the need for browsers to type in an address into Google to find out more about a property.
It’s been interesting to read some of the feedback on their Twitter account http://twitter.com/realestate_au & their Facebook fan page http://www.facebook.com/realestateAus
Lots of people don’t like change no matter what & others have some valid issues with the site.
Whilst I’m still working through some of the issues raised and whether they will have a significant impact, overall I think it’s a vast improvement and should make for a better end user experience.
Brett Clements
‘The Man Who Owns The News’. I can’t comment from an Agent’s perspective. I can’t comment from a coder’s perspective. However. I do believe I can comment from a journalist’s perspective. Because I am one. Trained by the very organization that ‘Owns the news’. When I was asked by Business2 to review this site, I spoke to a high source at realestate.com.au. I was given access to the BETA site. And I couldn’t find a single button for video, or even rich media. All this in the age of YouTube and the ipad – the promised ‘Jesus’ gadget for newspapers. I asked ‘why?’. I was told – “we’ll be in contact..” The phone never rang. http://www.realestate.com.au is owned by News Limited. Along with all the other prime suburbans. No wonder video doesn’t rank. You can’t print video. And in the book about The Man and his organization, ‘Paralysis’ is used to describe the company’s stance on technology. One memorable paragraph from that book. When Rupert met the guys who created Google, he asked: “Why don’t you guys read newspapers?” Because nobody reads them anymore.
Nick
The ‘Have You Considered?’ boxes on the search are a curious addition. A interesting way to get more money from agents as a kind of featured search.
The map search view is confusing even to me.
The Open for Inspections tab however could be quite useful.
Overall its a massive improvement.
It actually looks like a site that wasn’t made in the 90s now.
Mind you the ads are still there.
Nick
Whoa impressive. They are now using Akamai for their images.
TPG has local caches in Brisbane and Sydney.
No clue where Optus’s is but from their looking glass the ping is 3ms.
Pipe Networks has one which is in Sydney and is also blazing fast.
Telstra has one in Sydney. Those locations are all I could test.
Basically if the images are loading fast for you, well they put a lot of effort in to it!
Glenn Batten
Not a Fan,
Agree on your suggested sites. If realestate.com.au was compared side by side to these sites as you can compare properties on their portal now, how would they really shape up?
Brett,
I look forward to your article on the new site and their lack of rich media integration and what some of the best of breed portals are doing with video around the world. I think it was huge oversight not integrating video into the design and treating it as an after thought.
Greg,
It will be interesting to see if the tide of negative comments they are having to wade through in the past 10 hours are just the vocal minority or is representative of the masses. They have certainly have had to deal with the immediacy and impact of social media like never before and I bet they are smarting from all the punches.
Sandra Connors
They must have listened to you Brett, as I see there is a ‘Floorplans & Interactive Tours section under the property description. If there is a video, Interactive Floor plan, Floor Plan or Virtual Tour associated with a property, a button appears under this heading.
Although… I see there’s still enough room in the task bar after ‘Print brochure’ to add ‘Video’or ‘Interactive Tour’. Move ‘Get Directions’ over to the Google Map on the right side (which makes more sense to me) and you’d have even more room to add Floor Plan, Interactive Floor Plan etc. Much better position I feel.
I certainly have a vested interest in the positioning of video buttons as I run a Property Video Production company, but I have also been a buyer (4 yrs ago) searching for a home interstate with a new baby & then again 2 yrs ago with a new baby & a toddler, and I have to say, any extra feature that showed the property’s features, floor plan or locality wasn’t a gimmick, it was a godsend!
This said, realestate.com.au have obviously gone all out ensuring photographs are loading at break neck speed, but have once again ignored other marketing tools which most Agents are using on a day to basis.
Glenn Batten
Nick,
I have a question for you. I had a problem with the beta and put it down to a security glitch.. but the problem still remains when looking at the search results page in any (tried IE, FF and Chrome).
I believed the problem was CSS related as I was getting all the text, just no styling. So I went through the code and manually tried to load each CSS reference. It seems that we are not getting some of the css files, particularly http://www.realestate.com.au/rs/page_searchResults.css
No matter what I do this comes up blank yet other people can bring this up fine. I thought it was a simple cache issue but http://www.realestate.com.au/rs/page_searchResults.css?123 still shows blank so I dont think it
Ashleigh Mac
I sort of expected a re-invention not a re-hash. I agree with Brett. I believe that unless realestate.com.au gets with the times and embeds vid and takes everything to the next level more and more people will hit google maps. I have found myself using it to find my listed properties lately. (I’m an agent)
Nick
Err that one would probably be the ‘Cteonnt-Length’ not being ‘Content-Length’ so I’m guessing Varnish added Content-Length: 0 which would cause Firefox to output nothing.
It also seems your ISP has cached that response as well, so it will only rectify its self once its fixed and the cache expires.
Thats a pretty spectacular typo. 🙂
Charlie
Certainly an improved cleaner top half of the home page putting search front and centre which is where it deserves to be. An improved search, but no keyword search. Why limit the search to address, suburb, post code and region? – why not go for the Google type search where you can put anything in (“ocean views in “)?
Beauty’s in the eye of the beholder, and if you like grey/shaded boxes, then you’ll love the new design. Property page though has become quite palid/boring? Agent details are now shoved below the map, should they not be more prominent (top left where the eye tends to go naturally?
Interesting how they are trying “own” the social media suburb commentary stuff – will this work? will agents hate it?
Glenn Batten
Nick…
I just used FF for the plugin to capture the headers. Nice spot on the content-length rewrite… damned if I thought that was what it was… I had a gut feeling those response headers would reveal the problem but I just thought Cteonnt-Length was something i did not understand 🙂
So you are thinking that it was realestate.com.au incorrectly configuring varnish then? and how do we know it is fixed now?
Its not just firefox but IE and Chrome. I have had this problem for quite awhile now and I assumed it would have expired out of the cache by now.
Could it be the problem remains with varnish even right now and my isp’s cache has added the content-length=0 line because there was no valid content-length entry? Meaning than even when it expires when it next gets a copy it just recreates a bad copy over and over again.
If this is a bad varnish config how many other people are effected? DFT is a wholesale isp so potentially we are talking about quite a few but any other isp based cache could also be doing the same thing yeah?
Nick
Hi Glenn
I just did a bit more of a investigation in to what could be happening.
Ok the misspelt header is NetScaler their load balancer. It appears to be the size of the file before its compressed. Nothing to do with Varnish.
Why it then sets a length of 0 for the compressed data is beyond me sorry. That is for REA’s techs to work out.
It must abort the compression stage or something.
Your ISP will cache it, but usually not for very long so if it is fixed it shouldn’t take more than a few hours to come good.
Yes it probably affects the entire isp.
Ok back on topic, One thing that is bugging me is that the new site doesn’t actually offer anything new when it comes to displaying the properties.
The rest is shiny, but that one page still shows the same old data in the same old way.
Nick
Jayne harwood
My current concern is the delay in rectifying faults with the searches. We notified them at 9.00am yesterday of a Suburb not being available when you search for it and the problem is still not resolved. I am sure they are being bombarded with faults but it will be their timely response to rectifying these issues that will be interesting to monitor.
Our Agency has invested heavily in REA Online Marketing and have Feature All/E Brochure All, Suburb Banners and what was the Guaranteed Top Spot. I believe that all these features have been diluted with the new site.
I am being told by REA to put my consumers hat on when looking at the site BUT I will be interested to see other agencies reactions to the new online marketing.
Glenn Batten
Nick,
I sent realestate.com.au a link back to this message on Twitter about the problem and the replied they are already on to that issue so hopefully I will get it working properly soon.
Glenn Batten
Jayne,
What you guys invest with realestate.com.au they should give you a share in the company 🙂
Jan
I have not been able to get past the homepage. The site all day 13th April and so far today 14th keeps ‘not responding’ when I try to click on ANYTHING.
So no I don’t like the changes when it means the site is no longer working for me!
Robert Simeon
Certainly an improvement – but anything would be from the previous 1993 template. The number of online (sales) enquiries we have received from REA in 2010 average between 10 to 15 per month which is a pathetic performance by a portal.
Recently I asked a few other agents from other agencies what their thoughts on REA was and we are all singing from the same hymn book.
In the latest REAL NEWS they claimed a record 6 million unique browsers which is an amazing claim given they dropped Google AdWords – so I can only assume that they won’t be advertising on Google again given their record result.
So let’s look at their top 10 most viewed suburbs on realestate.com.au in NSW released Tuesday March 30 @ 2:06 pm in my inbox.
1. Castel Hill (does not exist Castle Hill does)
2. Baulkham Hills
3. Mosman (and nobody responds?)
4. Surrey Hills (well that is in Victoria – not NSW)
5. Sunday (that is a day in the week)
6. Chatswood
7. Caringbah
8. Epping
9. Cronulla
10. Hornsby
So all the suburbs in the Eastern Suburbs don’t even rate? I doubt that – but then again they believe that Sunday is a suburb, Castel Hill exists and Surrey Hills is now in NSW.
REA may be kidding themselves with all their self gratulations but they are certainly not kidding the consumers – from our experience they left that portal many many years ago.
Glenn Batten
Robert … that’s funny … what was that song… Sunday… Bloody Sunday!
Robert Simeon
Glenn – maybe if bulls$&% was music REA would be a brass band!
Daniel O'Meara
REA would have known that the site doesn’t display correctly since at least the 16th March because the same problem was affecting the beta site. Don’t hold your breath waiting for them to fix it!
PaulD
Just getting used to the new site, and obviously the things that I don’t like are the things that comments are made on. The thing that bugs me most (at this stage) apart from the fact that our enquiry rate on sales has dropped to 140 email enquiries for every 10,000 “Unique Browsers” whilst property management enquiries remain at 2% lust like it always has. (sorry back to what bugs me) The pics are displayed with that annoying filmstrip across the bottom which sits on part of the pic, and to see all that I have to scroll down.
So instead of a one click per pic, its click and scroll down. Now that may be my screen resolution but every other website I have looked at manage to fit the pic in the space provided. So that bugs me so far.
Nick
Hahaha Robert I read both your comment and Jan’s together.
“So no I don
Glenn Batten
Nick,
They never had the suburbs working well. There were plenty of suburbs in their system that do not exist plus there when you had multiple suburbs with the same name in the same state a search on the suburb name would show properties from both locations.
The suburb of West End is in Brisbane and Townsville.
Not only would suburb searches cause this problem but so would postcode searches. It seems their database was not indexed by postcodes. Instead if you searched a postcode it would first work out what suburbs are in that postcode then it would search those suburbs which would bring the bug into play.
So a search of 4101 which is in Brisbane, or for the suburb of West End would both be populated with Townsville properties.
Crazy but that is what happened.
So with the upgrade they have fixed all these things so they obviously made some changes.. and thus brought in some new bugs 🙂
Chris
Design of the search results page = Trulia.
exact copy
Innovation….
Rusty
Looks like a US consultancy called Local Matters is claiming credit for the new realestate.com.au.
See http://www.localmatters.com/blog/2010/04/13/why-arent-open-houses-open/
Glenn Batten
I see the like it.. and claim realestate.com.au are clients. but I dont know if they are saying they did the new site. Might have to read it again in case i missed something
Aaron
The “surrounding suburb” function does not work!!
Which is quite frustrating, now I have to search through suburb by suburb, whereas the old website would come up with all the surrounding suburbs’ listings.
Anyone else having the same problem?
Couldn’t find a feedback e-mail to relay the message through. Hopefully it will be fixed soon.
Glenn Batten
Nick,
My display issues are now fixed. 🙂 Thanks for your help on that..
Glenn Batten
Now that realestate.com.au fixed their typo problem I can see much more of the site than I could before….. and with regard to the open for inspection area I must have been a fortune teller..
I did a question and answer interview with Nestoria Australia for their blog at http://blog.nestoria.com.au/2010/03/10/nestoria-australia-interview-glenn-batten-first-national-real-estate/.
One of the questions was:
Is there any technology you
Nick
Any time Glenn. 🙂
Oh and they’ve just broken the site. Error 500.
Didnt they run ApacheBench on it for a few hours before hand?
If any of their techs are reading: Its called testing guys.
Jayne Harwood
This is the response I have received re. the Suburb issue from their Tech Team.
“This is a known technical issue with the new site whereby certain suburb searches are returning no listings, despite their being listings in that suburb.
The problem does not seem to be suburb name (South Launceston or Launceston South) as the auto suggest box when typing in the search box should stop this being a problem but rather is a technical fault with the new site. The team are looking to have the issue resolved as soon as possible.”
I have asked for a timeline for the fix but they are unable to give me one other than to state it is a serious issue that they are working through.
2.5 days and counting and we still do not have one of our major suburbs in Launceston showing. Also our property visits have dropped by more than 1,000 per day and for some reason now the report won’t even generate!
Gareth
It’s terrible. Hard to search and the picture viewing is awful. Why am I forced into a little box on my huge screen? Especially with floorplans for something like a terrace house which are longer than they are wide. They are either too small to view or you have to zoom in and scroll around that tiny screen.
Too smart for it’s own good. It’s also a bit cludgy with a whole “click and wait” feel about it, as well as a very “busy” look about it. I never really liked Domain but I’m tempted to swap to it because I’m there to search for houses and frankly, the simpler and faster it is the better. Look at Google – world’s most popular website and world’s most basic.
Nick
Argh!!!! My Eyes! I just found the worst thing about the new site.
http://realestate.com.au/property-house-vic-cranbourne+north-106474129
Go there, click on the floor plan with the purple background. Get it to show in the fancy popup window.
Then watch your brain explode all over your monitor(s).
Yes they went there. They put a Google Maps style zoom on the floor plan – complete with pan and zoom.
Its the only way you can see all those JPEG artefacts right up and close after all.
Not to mention when you click it and it goes where the main photo was and its horribly stretched.
Someone got in to the Web 2.0 toolbox and emptied it in to the new site.
Kirsten
I’m not too impressed.
I like that we can now save multiple searches. But I have lost the ability to delete properties from my saved list (the old site had this bug for a while, too).
I too have the problem of ‘surrounding suburbs’ not showing up properly. I think they show up in the very end of the search results, which is a pain if you want to see the latest listings first.
May start using domain again.
Jen
I can’t believe it’s been 4 days and they still haven’t fixed the problem with search results for some suburbs. It looks like someone messed up the database. If you do a search for Hollywell in QLD – (without selecting surrounding suburbs) – there are zero results. If you look at the source code – (find the word region) – it seems that Hollywell has been put in the wrong region –
i.e. state=QLD;region=southern_brisbane;pcode=4216;sub=hollywell;
It should be region=gold_coast.
Suburbs that do have search results displayed have the correct region appearing in the code.
This is just one example – there are many others including Fortitude Valley – which should be brisbane_city instead of northern_brisbane.
Surely with all of their resources they can find and fix the problem.
Glenn Batten
Jen
There a many problems in the suburb database and they were hoping to fix it by Friday but I reckon they were a little bigger than they first thought because I was then told it will be fixed over the weekend.
The same problem you are experiencing is also in South Launceston and many others around the country. The funny thing is the properties are there for you to view they are just not being recalled through the search facility. .
If you start with just a search on Paradise Point switch to map view.. tick
expat Aussie
So the new website – I have had problems with it on 2 computers – in both cases I can search for listings (the buikld tab works fine) in buy and see the listings but when I click on an actual listing to see it I get a blank screen with the summary address details at the top and a “done” status lower left.
I have emailed their tech support. Have checked for pop up blockers etc etc and they are on my safe list – Anyone lese have probs with their functionality?
I still liked the other one better – it seemed to work well so I can’t see what the change was for
DesignerN00b
too busy for me, the following greasemonkey script makes it a bit more usable — even though the design still sucks and is slow
// ==UserScript==
// @name REA
// @namespace REA
// @description REA Lite
// @require http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.2.6/jquery.js
// @include http://www.realestate.com.au/*
// ==/UserScript==
(function() {
$(‘#siteLinks’).remove();
$(‘#main’).remove();
$(‘#meta’).remove();
$(‘#searchByWhereBottom’).remove();
$(‘#hdr’).css({“padding-top”: “6px”});
$(‘.searchForm’).css({“padding-bottom”: “36px”});
$(‘#results’).css({width: “788px”});
$(‘.descriptionCont’).css({width: “533px”});
})();
Rusty
A week or so after launch I thought I’d have a crack at calmly answering Glenn’s initial question, from a house hunter’s perspective.
After spending the last week using the site I’d say there is a lot to like about the new user experience. Street-level searching and alerting; open for inspection planner; side-by-side picture galleries; map-driven searching; sold price searching (again at street level) etc. etc. From a buyers perspective this site allows me to find relevant properties quickly and easily, compare them, add them to my calandar and research what price I should be paying. What more could I ask for?
Well – where there may be room for improvement is in the filtering which I think is a bit clunky (not sure about all the drop-downs). Some of the refinement options also seem unnecessary (I had no idea so many types of aircon existed!) and because it doesn’t tell me how many properties to expect when I make such a refinement I keep on narrowing too far and end up with zero results. Also, I’d like to be able to search on decriptive terms (e.g. waterfront or development opportunity). This would really work well when searching across a group of suburbs (e.g. Sydney’s Inner West), itself another great new feature btw.
On balance though, whilst it falls short of a masterstroke it is by no means a dud either. In fact, considering their market dominance, I think the REA team deserve a lot of credit for the amount of thought that they’ve put into this new platform. And yes I initially encountered some bugs like everyone else but its been working perfectly well for me for days now. Domain (which was my favourite user experience) and the rest will need to respond pretty quickly. This site is once again my starting point for property search.
Susie T
HATE IT! I agree with some other comments – the “old” site was more “user-friendly”. I have now started using other sites instead – why can’t they have an “opt out” – so you can still access the “old” site! Ebay did that for a while.
Allison
I have been so happy with the old realestate .com.au. I was constantly using it to find the cheapest house in an entire state, and by hitting latest listing and working backwards i could work out which ones had been on the market the longest.It gave me lots of information that way.Photos and prices of recently sold homes in that area were excellent features. even poor photos were a bonus to me as it meant that other prospective buyers may have passed it by. In other words i fancied myself as a bargain buyer. my husband and I have gone on several little country jaunts to some obscure places to be potential purchasers. However not any more. No siree. that little pleasure in life has gone by the wayside. I am absolutely apopoliptic with rage at not being able to use this new site.I am a middle aged little lady.for me it has to be simple.it doesnt even sort out low to high. For the love of God please put the old one back on.
Glenn Batten
Allison,
All the things you describe are still on the site. There location has obviously changed
Here is the total list of Queensland properties starting at the lowest
http://www.realestate.com.au/buy/in-queensland/list-1?activeSort=price-asc&source=location-search
and the most recent
http://www.realestate.com.au/buy/in-qld/list-1?activeSort=list-date
The benefit now is that whatever search you did before was limited to 200. Now technically you could work your way through the whole state page by page. But at 20 properties per page and 128169 properties for Queensland that might take awhile 🙂
Change can be a pain, but I reckon once you get use to where everything is on the new site you will love it…. eventually!
Kay Spence
I still can’t delete properties from my “Saved Properties” list – now up to 34 and growing daily. I just want to get a few off that I’ve been out and see and don’t want in there any more.
I thought if I could just take myself off the site – Myrealestate, then I could set myself up again and start saving properties all over again, but I can’t seem to find anywhere that I can unsubscribe or take myself off as a member or whatever. Am I just failing to see it, or is there no way to do it?
I’ve also stopped receiving daily alerts for new properties. I’ve tried deleting off all my Saved Searches/Alerts and then set them up all over again, but no daily alerts still. Anyone else experiencing this? I also can’t seem to set up the Saved Searches to have all the new properties on top.
Oh well, I’ll just keep trying on a daily basis. Although I can see all the benefits of the new site – a search on West End in Brisbane rarely brings up West End in Townsville any more – yay!!! – I sort of miss the old site that really did work for me. I’ll be patient however, and hope they get the glitches fixed for buyers and sellers.
Sean
I still cannot delete from my saved properties…
Very painful 🙁
Simone
Some of the changes are really great, for example I really like the mapping function and I also like being able to save any places I want more information on later, however not being able to delete properties is a massive draw back, I have also been sending realestate.com.au messages to let them know that it is broken and get some information on when it will be fixed, I have yet to even get a reply that is not an automatic reply.
Other down sides I am finding is that all of my saved lists went nuts and I started getting something like 15 emails per day from them, after fixing the lists myself I am now not getting any of the new properties that fit my criteria. I also miss some of the functions that I used before, like being able to set a maximum number of bedroom or anything else, as an investor it’s important to me to be able to search for exactly what I want and I now have to spend more time sifting through my results.
I could honestly go on but I will end my vent here instead. Mostly I hope they fix the deleting items from the saved list soon, as a web developer I can tell that it is simply not that hard to get it to work and it can’t honestly take this long to fix.