About this time last year Sensis told us they would be launching a National Real Estate Portal in the middle of 2005. The site Just Listed has come under allot of flak from me in previous posts and continues to be a terrible excuse for a Portal. So I hope for Agents sake that Sensis have their act together and release a new portal as promised.
So why is Just Listed so bad.
1. The site has just basic information for each property. This is bad because the general public is so used to getting so much more information through listings on sites such as realestate.com.au and domain.com.au. House Size, Land Size, VR Tours, Floor Plans. The Internet is built around being able to deliver a wealth of information so that the public can make an informed decision about contacting an agent. The old newspaper days of telling us little and getting us to contact agents is over, although still applicable to newspapers. This saves agents time and money and also the consumer.
2. Fix the damn system up
Having to upload images thru a client side software package separate from listing information is time consuming and just plumb dumb. Fix this up please.
3.Accept Feeds
As agents move more and more towards systems (like Agentpoint – owned and operated my my good self) and others such as My Desktop and Properties Online)they want the ability to feed that data into your system. Get your developers to spend one week writing a schema to accept this and you will at least get a look in with larger agencies.
4. Dump the Paper Guide – Although an excellent publication and although there might be good money in it if successful, it is old school and doomed for long term failure. Ok, you are now a publishing company and have the excellent trading post, but do not get too smart. The Internet is the future of realestate, not newspaper guides. Agents will only use newspaper in the future for branding, nothing else, so bite you lip, swallow a little pride and dump the guide.
So it will be interesting to see what happens (if anything) over the coming months with Sensis and www.justlisted.com.au, having bucket loads of cash does not give you internet success, it just makes rivals wary.
