It seems that realestateview.com.au wants to play with the big boys and in doing so, will definitely come under the telescope from other industry groups and agents across Australia.
Let me make this clear, I think it is great to see more competition and realestateview.com.au have certainly ramped up efforts in recent times, however there are still a number of questions that they need to address.
As realestateview.com.au are pushing ‘industry owned’, they will need to be open and transparent with the industry.
1. Ownership: As we have seen in the past with REA and the previous owners of MyHome, the issue of ownership is important and realestateview.com.au will need to make it clear who owns what % of this entity.
2. Fees: What are the basic fees and what controls are in place now and what will be these fees in 10 years time? What controls do you have in place on these fees?
3. Competition: As an industry site are you going to have your members compete against each other for the search results positions? Will there be multipler levels of memberships and if so why?
4. Visitors: Costs aside, one thing REA and Domain do very well is bring actual benefits to their members through property inquiries, how are you going to address this?
So should you support Realestateview.com.au? In a nutshell, if you are happy with the terms, cost to benefit and if there are some strict guarantees in place, then yes, however there are still some serious questions that this site needs to answer.
Technology wise, they need to take some big steps, remember, feeding to sites has a cost from most feed suppliers.
In my humble opinion myhome.com.au and homehound.com give around the same return as realestateview.com.au (enquiries are all that matter) and they are free, so I just cannot see how they can justify any costs at all until they can give a return and put some guarantees in place. Otherwise all you are doing is building up another portal who can hurt your wallet later.
We need competition to keep domain and REA in check and being cheaper doesn’t cut it, you have to provide value for money and time!
I am all for competition, but at this stage realestateview.com.au are asking more questions than they are answering.