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.
10 Comments
Zac
About time… The page FELT at least 3 or 4 years old. Not a big change, but welcomed anyway…
Robert Simeon
Good idea that they listed the features as it is difficult to notice any significant changes. How times change as once they led the industry and today they follow. Hey I just described Twitter 🙂
Peter Ricci
I like some of the changes, it gives the site more air. Pretty tiny text though, I wonder how many complaints they will get by elderly on font sizes (I get complaints quite often)
Robert Simeon
What they should be concerned about is by the large degree that customer email responses have declined where today, we are lucky if we get a handful a week compared to Domain who provide on average five times more enquiries. We used to get a lot more and it keeps getting less and less. Internally REA should look at what some agencies were receiving over the past few years and then they would realise that they are losing market share.
Sal Espro
Exackery, Robert! Let’s face it, if you’re not a graphic designer the site’s pretty much the same.It’s a telling sign when a site that is so important to this industry gets excited about service features that should just be a part of its normal offerings and not a reason to beat its chest!
What in the bloody hell is Google doing? I’m now at the point of being pee’d-off with them for promising/teasing so much to the real estate industry and not delivering when they could do it so easily! (Please don’t tell me they had a non-compete with REA and Domain when they did those deals a coupla years ago!?) They need to watch-out or we’ll start talking about they way their ‘Street view’ is pretty pox now as the pics are now are so out of date! This is what happens when you become part of the traditional mainstream – Just ask REA 🙂
Glenn Rogers
Looks much the same to me.
If they want to increase revenue they will need to develop spin off sites to harvest from related industries and sectors.
Sal Espro
C’mon, Glenn, don’t say that or give them that idea, please. Who wants to pay yet more fees!!
Glenn Rogers
Ahh Sal pick a number a double it 🙂
Na I think agents are fairly well serviced at present, someone would have to come up with a killer app to make them want to pay any more but there’s more to real estate than agents….. there’s a hint…….
Sean Wyld
Location, location, location… personally I prefer the maps based interface REA developed for it’s test site property.com.au. It’s a shame that they haven’t developed it further since launch or incorporated some of the features back into their main site.
Charlie
errr… apart from centring the site (not noticeable on 1024 pixel screens in any case) what has changed? Still seems pretty packed and cluttered home page to me; the search (the guts of the site) is still the same..? I must be missing something!
some of our clients are complaining that their home open times are being deleted (?) in the headline – is this cos they want everyone to use the new open for inspections thingo? Anyone else noticing this?! I would find that unbelievable, and maybe my clients are imagining things…