New Portals need to have a good long hard look!

Having a small voice in the industry sometimes means having to listen to allot of guff from would be Internet Kings. Frequently I receive emails from new companies (and agents) wanting to hawk there products. More often than not what they are offering does not suit the purpose of this site. Sometimes the products are great and sometimes they are just shelf fillers.

However today I received a forwarded email from Robert (thanks) and I just threw my eyes up….again

The biggest problem I see with many of the new smaller interests is they play against how bad realestate.com.au and domain.com.au are (in their eyes) and how you can save buckets of money with them. They forget to think that these portals actually have real visitors, making real enquiries and generating real results. The main marketing line is an absolute doozy, from a site that has just over 240 property listings!

Here is the email I was forwarded…………..

The Headline: Your Google of Real Estate Marketing! (Peter’s Comment – yeah sure, so many similarities! And the catchy name!)
The Body: Did you know that James Packer’s Publishing and Broadcasting (PBL) is taking realestate.com.au and domain.com.au head on?

That’s right PBL wants a slice of your money, the 80 million profits generated from online property advertising. Healthy competition they call it. Hopefully agents will benefit from lower subscription costs and initial free advertising deals. That would be the logical thing to assume with a major third player coming online.

Of course they want to make money, it is what they do! Of course, we have seen price wars before. They are the long awaited relief. The reality is, they are short lived. Remember Compass One & Two? They went broke in no time and airfares went back up to where they were. We are not suggesting PBL would go broke, but then you would have “the Big 3”, who like “The Big 4” (banks) never really put their prices down.

Yes true, however starting a bank or an airline does cost a little more than a website and ongoing costs can be quite high, so absolutely no relevance to this industry whatsoever!

We at itorip.com.au have our own agenda. We keep working hard developing the best facilities and services we can for you at no cost whatsoever.

Okay, have to stop you here, best facilities? Have you looked at the site? I am sorry this is just another boring template style site that would take a few weeks to get up and running! You can buy scripts for these sites for a couple of hundred dollars.

The itorip.com.au team is not chasing any of your $80 million.
The itorip.com.au team is striving to shrink your $80 million expenses
The itorip.com.au can successfully achieve this by your no strings-attached registration and postings of your listings.

If you haven’t registered yet, visit itorip.com.au now and support the site that supports you.

Place your ads today. Tell your friends about this exciting new site.

Regards the Itorip team

First things first, I assume that by ‘team’ they mean ‘me’ or ‘I’, because there is no way there is a team working on this. Only 200+ free listings are on the site and are they trying to tell us they are some sort of large organisation?

The Sign Off: This email was sent to you because we believe itorip.com.au has a lot to offer to you; without any obligation. However, should you wish to be removed from our mailing list please send us an email with the message “Opt Out”.

Opt Out? Why would they opt out of something they have never opted into? If agents get continuous emails then this company should be taken to court, as it is illegal to send bulk emails to people who have not subscribed to a service.

Finally
Here is a message to all would be Internet Real Estate millionaires. If you want to release something, better make it different, if you are to boast then you better back it up. I am all for the small guys but releasing junk like this is an insult to other companies that actually think about developing a great site.

These sites are just trash, made up by people that just think that by slamming the big guys agents will just line up, I am sure they mean well, but it is just complete and utter rubbish. I have telephone conversations with allot of people developing products and the one thing that stands out is the complete and utter rubbish that comes out of most (not all) of their mouths about costing and staff levels. A gentleman recently had a meeting with me to help his site and give my overall opinion. He told me that he had 10 full time staff, who had been working for 6 months. During our meeting I told him he should sack 8 of his staff, hire an interface designer and start over – and I was being nice…! He obviously did not listen to me and 6 months later he has hardly any listings, a site designed by his nephew (the genius of course) and a business going down the drain.

Now the facts are he probably had 2 full time staff and definitely a friend who designed the site – so why try to impress me? Who knows, that guff works for some people, but a truly great Internet development only needs a small dedicated team and allot of nous.
Developments like these are not rocket science. As an example, to redevelop the main part of realestate.com.au (minus advertising systems) might cost you around $1 million. You could do it for less, but there are a fair few smarts behind the system! So this is where I would start, not with the site, but with bthe systems!
I am sure I will check back in 6 months and it will either have disappeared or it will still have less than 500 listings.

No Really Finally
If any of these sites were to become popular I am sure they would sell out to anyone who would pay them enough money and agents would all be back where they started. The industry may well need a knight in shining armour, but it isn’t going to come from private enterprise, it has to be a committed partnership between all parties.