It will be very interesting to see how the real estate community reacts to domain.com.au’s decision to allow some 1739 Private Seller listings to be uploaded onto their site by buymyplace.com.au.
Property Portal Watch author Alice Allen announced that “Listings from For Sale By Owner portal buymyplace.com.au have now been added to domain.com.au,”
For years now I’ve wondered why domain.com.au would use an agent subscription based model and position themselves in the marketplace as a real estate industry portal who also allows Private Sellers to upload onto their site for a nominal fee?
They seem to want to have their cake and eat it too. But unfortunately, I think this decision to upload listings from buymyplace.com.au will highlight their strategy to have a foot in both camp. It could easily be interpreted by agents that they are stabbing them in the back or biting the very hand that feeds them.
In my book, in the real estate portal world you’re either one thing or you’re another. And if domain.com.au are going to take further subscription payments from agents then they need to decide.
Domain.com.au you’re either an industry portal or you’re a Private Seller portal. I don’t believe that you can continue to be both and remain relevant into the future.
On top of all this, the timing of this decision couldn’t come at a worse time, especially after the extensive changes that have just been made to the realestate.com.au site.
The new changes to realestate.com.au haven’t been overwhelmingly popular with users and agents.
Without the benefit of statistics, but from reading lots of the feedback via social network sites it appeared that domain.com.au may have actually made up some ground on REA in the past few weeks as many property seekers jumped across to use domain’s site.
I’m not sure whose decision this was but I don’t think it’s going to go over too well within the real estate community.