Thoughts on Portals

There’s little doubt that digital advertising of real estate is the preferred method consumers use to search for a property to buy or rent. In Australia, about 70 per cent of all properties that come to market find themselves listed on a web portal. This is extraordinarily high compared to other countries where in the USA, for example, less than 8 per cent of properties are listed on publicly accessed classified portals.

The public’s embracing of digital classifieds over print has been swift. By way of example, in 2005, my business spent about $250,000 on classified advertising in The West Australian, last year I spent zero.

The current digital classified space is dominated by the Murdoch majority owned www.realestate.com.au. Last year it raked in about $3 billion across its operations and has a capitalised value of about $14.2 billion.

In WA, www.reiwa.com the member owned portal of the Real Estate institute of WA punches well above its weight. Widely supported by its members (95 per cent of agents are members of REIWA), the listings you’ll find on reiwa.com are the same as those found on realestate.com.au but without all the distracting “house & land” package ads and with richer, more informative WA-based information about property and the market. It’s significantly cheaper to advertise there too and the site is filled with unique mapping and suburb information that you can’t find elsewhere.

The third major player here is www.domain.com. Part of the Fairfax group (think The Age and Sydney Morning Herald) Domain has tried hard to penetrate the WA market with limited success. Domain is answerable to its shareholders and it continues to push into the WA market, encouraging agents to list their properties on their site. It’s mostly still free to do so but I recall a time when listing on realestate.com.au was relatively inexpensive. Clearing out the shed the other day I found a realestate.com.au account for $473 per month for a “Platinum” subscription in 2006. My company’s bill last month was more than $20,000.

No surprise that when our realestate.com.au rep came to visit this week, we were told our fees will be going up yet again.

Realestate.com.au have done well to capture such an enormous slice of the market in such a short period but there’s room for small, value-add enterprises such as reiwa.com. In Queensland, for example, where there’s no viable not-for-profit run portal as a competitor, it costs sellers three times as much to promote a property on-line.

Commercial portals are effective but ask your agent to include your property listing on www.reiwa.com and support the only portal that actively supports the agent you employ along with the entire property industry.

Hayden Groves is an elected member of the REIWA Council and is a former President of REIWA.