The Unconditional Blog

The impartial voice of the industry

 

Archive for the ‘Website news’ Category

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Unconditional goes out on its own!

Posted on: December 22nd, 2009 | Filed in Featured, Website news

v2Social media was a seldom used NZ phrase back in 2007 – especially in the context of real estate. That was when the first tentative steps were made by Realestate.co.nz to embrace the emergence of social media – creating a single blog to speak about the property market and the real estate industry, coupled with a free blogging platform for all real estate agents.

Fast forward 2 years and with more than 25,000 unique visitors per month logging on to read the more than 300 articles posted on the Unconditional blog and the many hundreds of articles posted across the more than 100 blogs started on the Voices platform, it is clear that social media has come of age in the real estate industry.

It is for this reason that we have decided that now is the time for Unconditional (the blog) and Voices (the blogging platform) to be launched on to its own platform separate from Realestate.co.nz to allow it to be seen for what it has truly become – a destination that truly can be seen as a place to find out exactly “what is going on in real estate”.

As from today Unconditional becomes a comprehensive web source of everything about the real estate market – written by people in the industry speaking openly, honestly and transparently about this industry, mixed with great data and reports.

There are 4 key sections of the new Unconditional site:

  1. The Unconditional blog – As was envisaged when this blog was started back in November 2007, this blog has become a valuable source of information, insight and debate. At times it has incurred the wrath of some in the real estate industry as it has striven to establish a honest and transparent commentary on what has been an incredibly turbulent time for the property market and the real estate industry at large. It intends to go on highlighting information, statistics and commentary on the market both here in NZ and overseas as well as the odd piece of light relied from the sometimes dry data.
  2. The NZ Property report – This monthly report produced from the data of the Realestate.co.nz website has fast become, since launching in April, a valuable complement to the established monthly data. The report track new listings, asking price expectations and inventory levels on the market.
  3. The Property Dashboard – This section provides a clear view on what are judged to be the key stats on the property market – selling price, measured as a stratified price index, inventory levels of property on the market and monthly volume sales. These charts are constantly updated to provide a comprehensive and timely view of the property market.
  4. Agent Voices – This platform has now been given a greater visibility for those active real estate bloggers who are keen to share their eclectic thoughts, insights and opinions on the market in their local area. There are over 50 active bloggers profiled on the Voices section of the site and these can now be viewed based on their geographical location.

The heart of Unconditional is the principle of social media – building and engaging in a conversation – an open, honest and transparent conversation, so please have a read and write a comment. There is much to share and much to learn so please let us (collectively) know what you think!

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NZ Property websites – August another record level of traffic

Posted on: September 10th, 2009 | Filed in Website news, Website searching

A number of recent search queries on this blog have originated from the question “what are the latest numbers for web traffic on real estate websites?” – so in a spirit of openness and transparency, here are the latest stats for August from Nielsen Online.

In the month of August a total of 1,489,294 unique browsers visited at least one of the real estate website tracked by Nielsen during the month. That is up 17% on a year ago and now represents the highest ever month. The previous record was just last month with 1,415,803. As can be seen from the chart below the rise of real estate web traffic has been steady and progressive over the past 4 year when back then 500,000 unique browsers was a record.

NZ real estate web traffic - total UB's to August 2009

Whilst the traffic may have grown 3 fold over the past 4 years the sales and buyer demand has not grown anything like that level. This demonstrates firstly the growing dominance of the web as the most utilised and valued source of real estate information, but also that online browsing of real estate listings  - and especially those of appealing lifestyle property is a very active kiwi pastime!

In terms of which websites are being viewed the table below charts the top 10 websites on the same metric of total unique browsers in the month of August 2009.

nielsen-top-10-sites-aug-09

What is noticable from the table is the growing polarisation of audience – those property portals (realestate.co.nz and trade me property) are stretching the lead. This is a function of the appeal of their respective offerings – in the case of realestate.co.nz, the most comprehensive content and in the case of trade me property, private sellers.

A final metric of the market for online real estate websites is the relative growth on a year-on-year basis. The total audience of all real estate websites is up 17% – indiviudally the growth of individual website from within the top 10 in most cases exceeds that growth  further demonstrating the polarisation to the major top sites.

Naturally we are delighted to see that realestate.co.nz is up a staggering 50% in a year delivering close to 400,000 unique browsers in the month of keen property searchers both here in NZ and from overseas.

% growth in we traffic for real estate websites NZ - August 2009

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Open home times – one site has it all!

Posted on: June 14th, 2009 | Filed in Website news, Website searching

istock_000000719688xsmallIt’s as much a part of the NZ property market as street signs and auctions! – the open home is the efficient and effective tool to enable agents to promote their clients homes and in doing so evaluate the interest in the property from prospective buyers.

However whilst there is no doubt that open homes remain a popular weekend activity for inquisitive property seekers – the process of planning an open home schedule has been up until now a challenging task requiring a degree in project management and a well structured Gant chart!

Well now just as property search was revolutionised by the web, so organising open home is equally being revolutionised by this website.

As of now anyone can search on any area of the country and select just the properties for which there is an open home planned in the next 7 days. No more cutting up the local newspaper or property magazine and gluing pieces of paper into a timetable – the web can do it all for you. Here’s how.

Realestate.co.nz Open homes June 09

  • Search box – this box now features a tick box, select this and you will just see the open homes featured on the site today with scheduled times in the next 7 days. At this time there are over 2,000 scheduled in the next week – that should keep you busy. As a point of note as with all listings we rely on the individual agents to provide the details to us of the open homes as well as their company data integration system. With this feature only launched today we will see the number of listings featuring open home details grow significantly over the coming weeks.
  • When you do any search for property at region, district or suburb level, whether it be for an apartment, house or unit, 3 bedroom, 2 bedroom etc you can filter the result by ticking the “only show open homes” tick box at the top of the filter. So for example if you were interested in looking for a home with 2 or more bedrooms in Taradale in the Hawkes Bay and you were looking to spend between $400,000 and $500,000, then you would have a choice of 16 listings to tempt you – of those 4 of them have open homes times scheduled this weekend.
  • Now having selected your chosen area and refined search if you save that search by registering your selection as part of “My Property” you will not only be sent notification emails of new listings that match your search but each Friday we will send you (your choose) an email which details in chronological order all the listings with open homes scheduled in the coming week. A great tool to making the planning of open home visits so much easier.
  • Never fear as to being kept informed of the status of open homes as the data transfer between each office and our database is very frequent ensuring that if for any reason an open home is cancelled or rescheduled then you can with this weekly email or by checking before you set off review the status of all open homes.
  • Best of all for every open home you are interested in viewing you can from the website download an reminder to your iCalendar or vCalendar which is compatible with most calendar based applications allowing you to take the details of each open home with you on your phone, PDA or iPhone.

As ever with all facilities on realestate.co.nz you know you are always seeing the most comprehensive selection of real estate listings of any website. There is no other website in NZ that has such a comprehensive selection of properties of all types. As at this time we have over 111,000 listings of which over 42,000 are homes for sale, 10,000 are lifestyle properties and over 17,000 residential sections. We have a subscriber base of over 93% of all licensed real estate offices and thereby are displaying the most comprehensive view of the market.

Expect more from us in the coming months as more and more open home details will be presented on the site. We have plans for further enhancements with mapping of open homes and in time GPS driving details – technology offers such great opportunities – all designed to help you make better use of your time in viewing those prospective new homes. Happy open home viewing!

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NZ Property Report – a changed measure for asking price – introducing ‘truncated mean’

Posted on: April 30th, 2009 | Filed in Website news

The subject of property statistics attracts a large amount of comment and in turn opinion. This is in large part due to the importance to which people nowadays ascribe to these stats as indicators of the health of the market and in some ways as a surrogate of consumer sentiment: house prices rising – consumer sentiment rises; house price falls – consumer sentiment falls.

When it comes to the total number of property sales and total number of listings of property on the market – there is no debate, the numbers are clear unequivocal and objective; however comment on a median price or an average price and the waters will part and the two opposing sides will commence their passionate debate as to the merits of each. In putting together the recent first edition of the NZ Property Report we thought long and hard about the judgement of describing the asking price as a median or average.

Whilst the definitions of each are well documented they do veer towards the academic, so in simple terms the merits of each can be described as such.

  • The average or mean price is just that the total of all sales divided by the number of sales. However its major failing is inherent in the diversity of property for sale in NZ – from $150,000 leasehold units to $15m luxury properties – each can when the sample size is of the order of 5,000 to 10,000 properties, cause significant swings in the final average.
  • The median price is the mid-point price of a range ranked from smallest to largest – this has the benefits of effectively ignoring the extreme variances of sales highlighted above. However there is a flaw in median pricing which has been highlighted most conspicuously when it comes to the asking price statistic and that is something called “lumpy data”. The fact is property marketed is usually priced increments of between $10,000 and $50,000 – typically you will find an asking price of $320,000 or $350,000 seldom will an asking price be $332,567! – this lumpiness can and does lead to the occurrence of the median moving by as much as $20,000 for the sake of 1 extra listing.

This dilemma has lead us to seek the advice from academics and economists who are as we have found most interested in this recent lead indicator data of asking price. From these discussions has emerged a recommendation for a new measure of asking prices for properties be adopted. This new measure is called a ‘truncated mean‘.

The logic of switching to a truncated mean is that in our judgment it affords us the best of both worlds – a more accurate measure of price with less influence of extreme values. A truncated mean is calculated by eliminating a percentage from the tails of the price distribution curve. The best method of explanation is to look at the data for March as shown in the chart below:

Realestate.co.nz March 2009 asking price distribution curve

The chart details the distribution of the asking price of the 13,284 listings which were added to the website in March 2009. The application of a truncated mean at 10% results in properties priced with an asking price of less than $200,000 and property with an asking price of over $1m are excluded ( the actual cut off point is not so clear cut but for explanation these points are used). The important point is that the 10% exclusion point at the ends of the data ensure that as prices moves so the sample is based on the most representative 80% of the market.

The choice of 10% as opposed to 5% or 15% both of which were investigated is as a result of detailed analysis of the data set going back to 2007. The rationale is that the more the extremes are removed the more the truncated mean approximates to the true average asking price for the majority of property however as ever there are diminishing returns. At 5% there are still too many extreme priced properties, equally at 15% the data set is significantly reduced by 30%. That is why 10% is judged to be appropriate given the scale of the data set and the makeup of the listings.

To provide some insight into the impact of this new measure as opposed to the existing measures the chart below provides some clarity.

Realestate.co.nz NZ Property report - median vs truncated mean

A key test of this new measure is shown when hypothetically some changes are made to the base data as a function of extreme sales results.

  • Scenario 1 – within the data sample of 13,284 listings just 2 new listings are added both of which are priced at $5m. The result – no change in the median price – no change in any of the truncated prices, however the average price would increase by $1,000 – all for the sake of just 2 listings
  • Scenario 2 – within the data sample of 13,284 listings just 5 new listings are added, all of which are priced below $200,000. The result is that the median price falls from $399,000 to $395,000 – no change in the truncated prices and the average price falls very slightly by $200.

These scenarios highlight the vulnerabilty of the data of asking price to movements in listing data sets that are in many way unique to asking price data, that is why with the new NZ Property Report to be released on the 1st of May and all subsequent NZ Property Reports will utilise this new truncated mean to present the asking price data, both current and retrospectively.

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Was that house sold or withdrawn?

Posted on: April 16th, 2009 | Filed in Online marketing, Website news

istock_000006201683xsmallThe realestate.co.nz website is a medium for the advertising of properties (commercial and residential) for sale or rent – that is the principle and since the start of the site back in 2006 we have actively discouraged (physically removed) any listings from agents that try to use the service to “advertise” a SOLD property in an effort to secure new listings.

This principle has been adopted to support what is in our belief the fact that buyers only want to see listings in the site that are genuinely “on the market”.

Now a smart real estate professional in Hamilton by the name of Greig Metcalfe posed the question to me the other day of “how do people know what happened to a listing when suddenly it disappears from the site whilst they have been tracking it?” – he rightly went on to say that people may wonder – was it withdrawn?, did it get lost and slip off some database? or was it actually sold?

This got me thinking and in the case of Greig – got him blogging – why not seek input from the public as property seekers and the industry to share their thoughts. So here is a concept to discuss – something I would really appreciate some feedback on to generate some valuable discussion.

To help clarify exactly what this concept is let’s say we, when notified by the listing agent that the property has sold (gone unconditional) we mark the listing with say a red banner as per this mockup and have it on the site for a period of 5 days after which it disappears. The listing will still appear in the search results in exactly the same position based on listing date.

sold-property

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Zoodle – property information

Posted on: January 15th, 2009 | Filed in Website news

Zoodle - its all about propertyZoodle – it’s all about property!

That is the strap line to the new property information website officially launched today and in someways that is all that needs to be said, it is a website all about property – information for over 1.5 million homes in NZ surpassing 30 million pages of information.

We have built in partnership with Terralink a website which we feel will provide much needed information in an easily accessible form to enable all parties involved in the property market to make better informed decisions.

The individual sources of data that combine to make Zoodle such a rich and rewarding website experience have been accessible individually for a long time, it is only the statistical data from realestate.co.nz which is new to the market. What is significant is the way in which data has been stitched together through the website to provide a very clear picture of a property – any property in NZ.

zoodle property reports and property information for every property in New Zealand

Zoodle is not just about properties – we have built rich information around suburbs and communities so people can be better informed as to the facilities and amenities that make up a local community. We are keen to embrace the contribution of others in profiling suburbs. To start with we have encouraged local real estate agents to share with us their feel for the communities in which they work. This will be developed later on into a richer user generated content section of the site, enabling people to feel a part of the site.

We see the site providing assistance at all stages of the home owning process:

Where to live? - zoodle can provide profiles of suburbs and local amenities and school details all presented on easy to use maps

What is the property market like in that suburb / street? – for each suburb zoodle provides valuable information on property price trends and inventory of properties on the market to assist our local knowledge. To be really clued up what better than to buy a local sales report detailing 20 of the most recent sales surrounding a chosen property

What can we buy? – this is where realestate.co.nz comes into its own – find the properties that interest you and then click through from property listings to full details about properties on zoodle – be better informed

Our chosen property? – before making any decision, why not check out the comprehensive property report for that chosen house to see all the available facts in a detailed downloadable 18 page report (sample report)

Negotiation – ready to buy, that’s when the skilled real estate agent can assist you. Armed with good local information combined with the agents rich knowledge of the day to day market you can be assured you will be making an informed purchase decision

Proud owner – always useful though to keep a check on the local market – a local sales report every year keeps you up to date with property price movements as well as the updated monthly graphs of the property market for your suburb; also get a latest valuation of the property to see how you stand in the market

Looking to sell? – do your research before your think about putting your house on the market – get a comprehensive property report to provide the full details of your property including a valuation and local sales – more importantly make sure you have a copy of the report which buyers will certainly be getting on your property

Zoodle – helping you through every step of the property buying process.

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Foreign buyers clearly recognise the leading website for NZ property

Posted on: January 12th, 2009 | Filed in Online marketing, Website news, Website searching

The online landscape for New Zealand property has radically changed in the space of a month with realestate.co.nz now firmly established as the most popular and most comprehensive website for overseas buyers.

With the closure of allrealestate effective 1st December and all referrals re-directed to realestate.co.nz the outcome was fairly certain – the scale of the visitors viewing NZ property from overseas was surprising. December is normally a much quieter month as people interest tends to turn towards holidays, families and Christmas.

International web traffic - NZ real estate Dec 08

A total of just under 113,000 unique visitor checked out properties on realestate.co.nz during the past month – some 80% more than the #2 site of Trade me property.

Source of international web traffic realestate.co.nz Dec 08The largest representation of visitors from among the 113,000 was from Australia closely followed by the UK and the USA, overall some 235 countries visited the website in the month. In total over 2.7 million pages were viewed by foreign visitors in the month across the 114,000 listings on the site.

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Realestate.co.nz now judged to be – “The place to be”!

Posted on: December 5th, 2008 | Filed in Website news

A little shameless self promotion surely hurt no one!

That is why I could not help but highlight this article posted on a new global real estate marketing services website (Property Ad Guru) started by the former CEO of the REA Group – Simon Baker. The article provides his perspective of the recent restructure of the online real estate market in the NZ which saw the exit of allrealestate.co.nz on the 30 November and the re-direct of traffic to realestate.co.nz from the 1st December.

The consolidation in the market in his view and as expressed in the announcement post on this blog will be a great benefit for the consumer and the industry – this is beginning to be seen by the results of just the first few days since this change occurred on Monday of this week.

Set against what is traditionally a quieter period heading into Christmas (week on week decline averaging 4%) the traffic to realestate.co.nz over just the first 4 days has exceeded 87,000 unique visitors up 5% as compared to the combined traffic of the 2 separate websites this time last week, and representing a whopping 34% increase over last week’s traffic to just realestate.co.nz. This is clearly a case of the merger adding value – rather than destroying value!

So not only is the closure of allrealestate adding redirect traffic to this website; the exposure of realestate.co.nz to a wider and wider audience is building an ever greater audience base – a base which in the view of Simon Baker could exceed 400,000 unique browsers per month boosting leads to agents by 30% to 50% – with no additional cost to the agents.

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A new phase for realestate.co.nz – a major opportunity for real estate

Posted on: November 15th, 2008 | Filed in Website news

The announcement of the decision by the REA Group in Australia to shutter their NZ website allrealestate.co.nz and direct traffic to this website represents a major success for realestate.co.nz and a major opportunity for the real estate industry.

Allrealestate.co.nz launched in NZ in October 2005 – just at the time that the market was really beginning to open up with the web searching being the most efficient means to access content. Their early success leveraged their international traffic partnership with the Australian site of realestate.com.au and coupled with a significant marketing campaign. Their traffic grew as sighted in the graph below through 2006 until with the re-launch, re-branding and re-platforming of realestate.co.nz their traffic began to suffer towards the end of 2006. The key issue was content – fighting against the comprehensive industry support of realestate.co.nz and the enormous pulling power of trade me – their appeal to the consumer began to falter and through 2008 the margin to realestate.co.nz has widened.

The benefits of this move will apply across the board to both consumers and real estate professionals:

Consumers

The key to the web is comprehensive content – people searching for a place to rent or a home to buy, ideally want to find one website that showcases every offering on the market, that way their selection is made with complete information. Now whilst realestate.co.nz is the most comprehensive real estate website in NZ it does not feature all listings. The fact is that with a competitor like allrealestate.co.nz actively selling their service out around real estate offices offering subscriptions deals, some offices decided that their offering was better resulting in split content across the sites (and other websites).

Now with the exit of allrealestate.co.nz we can actively convince the remaining offices who did not choose to subscribe to realestate.co.nz to come across and fill the gaps and make this website the true comprehensive portal for all the real estate listings in the NZ – perfect for the consumer whether they be buyers, sellers, renters, investors, landlords or businesses.

The real estate industry

This move is great news for the real estate industry. With less confusion as to which website to promote their listings on, the industry can rely on realestate.co.nz to actively grow the consumer reach and usage of the website to ensure that their client listings achieve optimal marketing. Not only that, the industry can save the costs of an alternative media option and at the same time support an industry owned site which every agency has a vested interest in through the 50% ownership held by the Real Estate Institute (REINZ).

Having an industry owned site grow even stronger with this move will ensure that the alternative media competitor of Fairfax owned Trade me will be required to be more circumspect about price increases as realestate.co.nz now more than ever provides a more effective price competitive option. Currently the subscription costs of the 2 sites shows the profit ambitions of Trade me. A single office subscribing for all property and rental listings pays $699 per month to Trade me, by comparison the same office can secure the same service for $200 per month from realestate.co.nz – with the added confidence that the subscription is invested in the site operation, development and marketing – and not for dividends to Australian shareholders.

This is a fantastic opportunity for this industry and this website – it is a new phase – one that holds the tempting opportunity for realestate.co.nz to cement its role as the most valauble real estate website in NZ.

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Realestate.co.nz and allrealestate.co.nz form an alliance

Posted on: November 14th, 2008 | Filed in Website news

Two of the leading real estate websites in NZ have today announced that they will form an alliance that will see the allrealestate.co.nz website owned by the REA Group in Australia cease to operate the allrealestate.co.nz website with effect from 1st December 2008 and all traffic will then be directed from that domain and all NZ links for residential listings from the family of REA worldwide websites to realestate.co.nz.

Clearly this is fantastic news for the company Realestate.co.nz Ltd, the real estate industry and the consumer all of whom are keen to more efficiently search for NZ real estate.

The official press release details the facts:

The REA Group and Realestate.co.nz Ltd Form Alliance in New Zealand

The REA Group and Realestate.co.nz Ltd have formed an alliance . Under the terms of the alliance, the REA Group will close its residential portal (allrealestate.co.nz) on 30 November 2008 and direct its traffic to realestate.co.nz.

The alliance gives realestate.co.nz access to the more than 9.7 million unique browsers a month*-including more than 4 million in Australia alone-who use the REA Group’s international network of real estate websites. These browsers will be able to access realestate.co.nz from a tab on the home page of every REA Group portal and from the map of New Zealand on the REA Group websites.

Alistair Helm, CEO of realestate.co.nz, said:

“This alliance is great news for New Zealand’s real estate agents and consumers; because together with the REA Group we can run a much stronger real estate web portal than if we continued to compete as with two separate portals. We believe this will mean a more efficient and cost competitive solution for the real estate industry as compared to all other media options.”

Shaun Di Gregorio, General Manager–Emerging Business Group, of the REA Group, said:

“We expect our alliance with Realestate.co.nz the Institute will better serve the country’s real estate agents and consumers-and buyers overseas who are interested in New Zealand property. We have decided that in the long term it doesn’t make business sense for us to operate our own residential real estate site in the country.”

The REA Group will continue to operate unchanged its New Zealand commercial real estate portal, realcommercial.com.au.

About the Realestate.co.nz
Realestate.co.nz Ltd is a Joint venture company owned in equal shares by The Real Estate Institute of New Zealand (REINZ) and Property Page (NZ) Ltd, a company owned by 6 of the largest real estate companies. The website is the most comprehensive website for real estate in NZ with over 112,000 listings, attracting over 90% of all licensed real estate offices to utilise the website which reaches an audience of over 260,000 unique browsers per month.**

About the REA Group
The REA Group, headquartered in Melbourne, operates Australia’s most popular real estate websites. In total, it publishes 22 websites and eight print publications in 10 countries. The REA Group had revenues of AUD$156m in FY 2008, has more than 9.7 million unique visitors each month* and is profitable. As a listed company on the Australian Securities Exchange (REA), realestate.com.au Ltd operates as an independent entity.

* Source: Nielsen//NetRatings, Omniture, Google Analytics
** Source: Nielsen Online

This is a marketing alliance and does not represent any change to the ownership, operating principles or the website of realestate.co.nz.

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