Google’s yellow man puts his hand round Domain’s throat
It’s been less than a year since Google Maps launched its real estate service for Australia.
At the time it launched, I wondered if it was going to kill off the likes of domain.com.au and realestate.com.au.
By the looks of a new ad for the service from Google, they’re now ready to bury the bodies on Bondi Beach.
Indeed, this is one of a series of local ads for the service that Google has released this week.
And while the sinister yellow Google man is enough to give anyone nightmares, real estate listing sites should be particularly scared.
The service is now well and truly populated.
While it may not yet be comprehensive, there are enough listings to make it worth home hunters’ while using it, whether to rent or buy. And speaking as a punter, it’s an easier site to use than the established players.
This growing audience will motivate an increasing number of real estate agents to make use of it. That and the fact that it’s free, of course.
As is its model, Google will make its money through the sponsored links it serves up alongside the data. Ironically those links currently include both realestate.com.au and domain.com.au.
The service is tilted towards the real estate companies rather individuals.
That seems like a smart strategy. It would make sense for stage one of the campaign to be to take the listings off the current aggregators. That relies on the real estate agents getting on board – and they wouldn’t do so if the service directly threatens their livelihood, which it would if it became too easy for punters to directly market their properties themselves.
Of course, once the Google Maps real estate service is the main market for home hunters, it would have no such barrier to opening up to individual listings.
(It’s nowhere near being that main market yet, by the way. Search Google for “search for home to rent au” or “search for home to buy au” and domain.com.au and realestate.com.au both come up in the first page of its natural search returns. Google Maps Real Estate does not. Yet.)
For the likes of Fairfax Digital, owner of domain.com.au, and News Corp, majority owner of realestate.com.au, it must be doubly infuriating. First they lose the print classifieds rivers of gold to the internet. The Google comes in and threatens their online businesses too.
That, of course though, is where they still have power. While estate agents still need to use print to advertise too, that’s a relationship they can force into online – which probably explains why some of the big real estate agents don’t seem to be on board yet. There’s a significant amount of money changing hands through the print relationship.
When we wrote about it last time, one of our commenters pointed out:
“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 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. 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.”
This front of media owners’ war with Google may not be as visible as some, but the stakes are just as high.
Tim Burrowes
RE classifieds still require strong customer service and unfortunately Google is years away from a passmark on the basics in this area.
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It’s not just real estate classifieds that are going to hurt, the online business directories are running scared of Google Maps as well.
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Who did the ads? They’re fun.
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How long ago was your other article? As i doubt with the rural press takeover those junkets are still happening at fairfax.
Google are good at sticking their fingers into many pies and still coming up the winner, because of their advertising model, and the fact that unlike normal platforms which prefer to be master of their domain (excuse the delicious pun) they want to be jack of all.
But convenience is king online, and having all in one (despite whether its as good as separate sites) is continually putting Google above traditional models of consumption.
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We call the yellow guy Pegman, and we hope he’s more helpful and friendly than sinister 😉
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@Anonymous_Coward
If you noticed that nice little search in the ad for ‘Cafes in Bondi’ the results are from directory sites like ours my247.com.au. We cannot rely on just being a directory anymore so we’ve had to innovate and build what we think is the future, personalised guides to going out – so a user can now can see gigs at their favourite venues, see cafes reviewed and recommended by their friends, get events listed by favourite types – have it all synced via their mobile too.
The internet landscape continues to change and you have to innovate or you will get swallowed.
The opportunity is how to work with the giants. The result is that sites like ours which rely on advertising can start offering better targetted experiences for our advertisers like if you want to target all females 18-34 who are going out this weekend we can offer that. If you want to target everyone going to an NRL game then we can reach them too.
Something which Google can’t offer…. for now 🙂
CK
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That explains it, Annie.
I was trying to puzzle out why one of the keywords used in the YouTube ad was “pergman”. it was a typo for Pegman!
But I still find him terrifying. The name Pegman would also be an excellent title for a horror film.
And Riarn, the previous article was about seven months ago.
Cheers,
Tim – Mumbrella
For a service tilted more to consumers but using the same backend database as Google Maps Real Estate see http://www.baseestatate.com. Shameless plug.
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Was that Zac Efron as ‘Mr. Yellow Blobbie’ in the first ad doing the surf lesson on Bondi Beach? Someone tell Annette Sharp at the Tele real quickly!
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Wonder how they are going to promote the ads? All very clever, but not sure of Fairfax Digital or NineMSN will play them……Any ideas?
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Just brilliant!
From a public perspective, its just what we need to get real estate agents to become a trusted occupation again.
Thanks Google for giving the power back to the vendors so we can list our property for free – on the largest site in the world. Yes there are other FSBO sites but without the major a corp backing they lack in updated functionally and search visibility.
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Well spotted Renee FSBO is certainly the big opportunity which will scare the big publishers and agents alike. Pegman could become their nemesis
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I think there are two possible scenario’s here:
1. Google offers the listings from free, in which case, they end up with alot of shite and duplicated listings on their site. As CraigsList found out, the way to fix this is to charge for real estate listings.
2. Alternatively, they monetise the real estate listings sooner (lets face, Google is a one-trick pony – AdWords – so why not?), and the agents are never going to go for Cost-per-Click pricing becuase (a) in general, they are not internet savvy and (b) its too hard to charge back to the property vendor.
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Hi Vic,
One thing that might overcome the quality issue would be to do something involving verification, similar to their business listing service,
I listed our business this week. The final step is giving a landline number. A couple of seconds later the phone rang and a robot voice (Pegman? Yikes…) gave a verification code to enter.
It wouldn’t be hard to do the same with property listings.
Cheers,
Tim – Mumbrella
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It’s funny how hard Google makes it to find some of its services. In this case, if you just go to Google Maps Australia, you won’t see anything about real estate listings.
You have to click on the ‘show search options’ link to make a drop-down menu appear from which you can choose ‘real estate’.
Even then, the default in the drop-down is “all results” which makes it sound like you’re tweaking search results, not choosing a particular kind of search. Which, of course, in Google’s entirely logical brains, is exactly what you’re doing.
If by now you haven’t given up your quest to find the Pegman and get his help finding a new house, you’ll find ‘real estate’ right at the bottom of the drop-down menu.
Say you give up, return to google.com.au and search for “real estate bondi” — do you get Google Maps Real Estate listings now? Errr no. Is there a link to Google Maps Real Estate? Errr no.
Why spend money on TVCs to market a product and then make it so hard for consumers to find?
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Alan Jones, I think the reason Google make it hard to find is they are taking a cautious approach in regard to the other players in the market, mainly realestate.com.au and domain.com. By featuring the real estate search on the home page and integrating it into the main search result they could almost put those companies out of business within months. That would not look good for Google and could hurt a lot of people. Instead they will opt for a slow death.
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Craig: which would make perfect sense… if they weren’t running advertisements for it on YouTube… I think it’s probably more about Google not being very good at ‘network marketing’ — making sure that each Google product markets itself and the other Google products well.
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i’ve lost count of the amount of digital companies and services google was supposed to come in and make redundant in the last 5 years.
Generally it doesn’t happen … more times than not they come in and play a bit role.
Yes, there are exceptions to this but generally the perceived fear of the Google monster and what it will do is a lot different to the reality of what happens when they do act.
Let’s see where this is at in a year.
@Chris Kettle
1999 just called mate, apparently Citysearch wants its business model back.
Couldn’t resist, apologies.
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@Craig
Google doesn’t really want to jeopardise their massive accounts with REA and Fairfax.
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Cam, I don’t really think this is the case. REA and Domain need Google more than Google need them. They may have massive accounts but there are a thousand others willing to make up the difference if they pulled their advertising (which they won’t).
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