Could Google kill Domain?
There was an announcement on the Google Australia blog on Monday that’s generated less conversation than one might have expected, considering it’s going to badly hurt real estate websites.
The search giant announced a new service which allows users to search Google Maps for properties for sale.
From the consumer’s point of view, it’s an incredibly good service. Give it a try.
You tap in the suburb and it shows you exactly on the map where properties – to rent or buy – are located. You can then click on the flag to find out more.
As a punter, I’ve never had much of an issue with the usability of Domain or realestate.com.au. But this blows them away. I wish it had launched a few weeks back, last time I moved. For the user, it’s a better, easier, faster service.
And this is the problem for the property web sites. Once Google is delivering a high response rate to to the estate agents, why would they go anywhere else? And of course, it will also speed up the migration of property advertising away from print.
Mind you, if I was an agent, I’d be nervous too. If this takes off – which it will – property owners may ask themselves why don’t they simply list with Google, rather than have an estate agent do it for them.
This is going to be big.
Tim Burrowes founded Mumbrella in 2008. He worked on Mumbrella until 2021. At various points he was editor, content director and editor-at-large.
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Realestate.com.au and Domain.com.au can only blame themselves if it does. I think I first saw google realestate for US about 4 years ago. It should hardly come as a surprise that it would eventually reach Oz.
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i don’t think Fairfax, realeastate.com.au will feel really threatened by this new service because they still dominate listings of homes for sale/apartments for rent etc and they haven’t allowed Google to use their raw listings data in this mashup
From a end users perspective if they all let their data feed into this service it would be massively useful .. especially since im looking for a rental property in inner Sydney at the moment
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I can see how this is going to give Domain a run for its money: simply by being able to see properties for sale on the streets you’re interested in is fantastic. But I don’t think it will change the decision to get an agent: there’s a lot more to selling a house than listing it online.
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This will inevitably eat into desktop browsing, but Domain’s iPhone app is killer! Actually easier to use than the old-fashioned browser. Its a major advantage having your Domain profile with you on a house hunt.
Google makes it up to Domain with Streetview, which has significantly enhanced online property search.
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What Google doesn’t appreciate and it may be cause for the paucity of the listings it provides at the moment, is that agents deal with Domain (and I assume RE.com.au) because of factors other than the quality of a mashup’s UI.
Fairfax pays massive subsidies or refunds or bulk discounts (to use polite terms, “kickbacks” is a term others may care to use but not I) to agents in return for their ads. I heard it said by an agent a number of years ago that agents can make more money from buying ads than they do from selling and renting houses.
In theory, this money for unused or refunded marketing budgets should be returned to the vendors but, I am told, this rarely happens unless the vendor jumps up and down.
And Fairfax (and, again I assume, RE.com.au) takes agents on junkets overseas and supplies them with all-expenses holidays. A mate of mine went on one of these to Cambodia a few years ago.
And in print the biggest part of any ad is promotion of the agent, not the vendor.
Domain has been using the Google Maps API for years, so not much new there.
Where this is likely to have an impact at least in the near term is on agents’ revenue themselves because they make a huge income from selling ads in their custom publications and on their sites.
For vendors who don’t need such a “marketing campaign”, they may feel freer to advertise and sell their houses themselves. This was the case for years in WA where groups such as Anreps were prominent. Less so in the Eastern States where the auction system was king but took a punishing series of blows from state laws.
As for the future, Google’s attempts is a poor cousin of zillow.com
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This has been a long time coming and (to us) is a welcome change. The existing sites charge exorbitant rates for listings/subscriptions and these costs are (of course) passed onto vendors as part of their “advertising package”.
Like others have said it is not as if the existing sites (who are all largely backed by newspapers who have seen their print RE advertising revenue shrinking) could not have seen this coming.
Interesting times ahead! this SHOULD translate to lower commissions and advertising costs from their current level and if it doesn’t I would encourage sellers to ask their agent why not. (or to look elsewhere).
Note also that as of late a lot of other sites such as domain and homehound have started to feel the winds of change and now allow private sellers to advertise on their sites. Admittedly for a large cost, but the change is starting.
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Agents who continue to push forward with great new sites themselves will have nothing to fear from Google but cannot afford to not put their properties on the new system.
Bresic Whitney’s new site is a great example of adding value to the house buyer:
http://www.bresicwhitney.com.a.....0Point#top
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Re: Domain iPhone app
It’s missing one of the most important things a location aware iPhone app should have – “Around me”.
Why do I have to enter a suburb or postcode?
Anyway, this comment isn’t relevant to this thread.
Still, this is another step to Google becoming the mega-aggregator of structured information. Very similar to what they’ve done for restaurants.
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I love the way you can enter your preferences and suburb and then you can drag the map and view properties in other suburbs nearby. It is so user friendly and effective for location hunting.
The data is from various sources and that could be the down side here. I tried to click on photos and it was not a great experience. However Google could use it’s own photo site and hey presto, it would be a killer.
In Sydney viewing days are traditionally Wed and Saturdays. Imagine sitting at a cafe at 9am with a coffee and looking on your phone where the next and nearest open house is… Now that has long legs. Get those viewing times uploaded, into Google maps – booom!
Go Google and it will be interesting to see what develops further here.
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No Google will not kill either Domain or Real Estate Dot Com. There is room for both. Having worked in the property industry for 40 + years there is ever more comment about sales people & consumers becoming too reliant upon electronic formats of promotion. This is making estate agents lazy, except those who still maintain a high level of personal contact. Google has been a tool in the space for a long time, but is just that another tool. Person to person contact is still the winner. But yes I do agree that both the big sites are terrible to use and they have turned into revenue cows. A big mistake. Google might just encourage them to improve their offer and give better value to consumers & advertisers.
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wow!
time to start looking for a new home.
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It’s a good mashup.
Makes me wonder. How hard would this be to do with hotels? A map of the hotels available where I am looking to stay would seem fairly easy to do using the data from wotif et al. Add on some decents pics of the rooms etc and you would be onto something that could potentially have far more frequent usage and give google a better ROI..
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As a landlord, this beats Domain and the other one hands down.
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Interesting but it’s solving a problem that doesn’t exist in my opinion. It’s making something that’s already pretty good a little bit better. To “kill” something (like Goog did with AV) you need to completely change the game and I’m unsure this does that.
Remember too – some of Google’s biggest clients are the Real Estate classifieds sites. There’s too many zeroes in the bottom line on those key accounts for them to attack them directly.
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@Rodney
But isn’t the old saying “location location location”?
This is literally location. You can look at a top down map simply and pick exactly where you want to live. You can turn on satellite and see the colour of the roof, when the transport is, etc.
Agents while useful need to learn to adapt. This is probably going to be one of those ways.
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It’s the plan from the very start. Google is like all very large corporations, they want to make money for their shareholders.
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How do you get a property listing onto the Google Real estate?
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Try suburbview.com (no .au, realestateview squatted the .au domain). Melbourne based startup that mashes real estate listings and Google maps. They pull listings from a range of major sites.
Google’s effort is solid, but suburbview is a generation ahead in both search and scope.
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Old form classified including Domain, RealEstate.com.au and Seek should be destroyed by Google – they offer very little value – their search product are abysmal compared to Google and they charge like a stuck pig for yet again questionable yield
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I’m not sure about Google “killing” http://www.domain.com.au/ or http://www.realestate.com.au/ but they sure have some catching up to do from an user experience point of view.
From personal experience these leading Australian real estate sites both lack at least these basic features:
1. Humane keyword based search that gives you exact, reliable search results based on obvious queries like “Austin St, Manly NSW”
2. Search and narrow search results based on floor area (squares or square metres). Searching by just the number of bedrooms is insufficient.
By virtue of being Google their real estate search solves the first one seamlessly, and there’s provision for the second one as long as the incoming data feed includes the floor area information, which may still be an issue.
In fact, the inability to search residential real estate by floor area is such a glaring omission that I recently wrote an article about it:
http://www.volkside.com/2009/0.....loor-area/
It’s good to see fresh competition stirring up the market.
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As someone who actually runs Domain accounts in my regional city, I can vouch that at least outside of capitals in each state we don’t give much to our agents in the way of kickbacks, but they do get free online ads with their print advertising, which is how most of them work here. The most they get is an invite to the client christmas party, which is some woolies platters and a movie 🙂
I personally like this, and I guess it’ll depend on price and the market of specific areas – here for example print still does well.
Almost every one of my clients are on both Domain and RE.com.au. As a buyer/renter my favourite part of Domain over RE.com.au is that I could view private listings that have come from classifieds etc as well as agent listings. The attachment to a paper worked for me in that respect and if the cost is high, private advertisers may not have the budget to afford it.
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I was reading The Age today and the lead story on the Business section was Fairfax and News Ltd talking about pulling their spends from Google around driving traffic to their real estate classifieds sites if they continue to try and compete against them on one hand, but on the other take their money …
Funny that.
This change is more beneficial for the user. Google wants to give the best service to its users.
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