Credit where credit is due! – thank you for suggesting this.

I have just had the most wonderful telephone call with the owner of this property, she is very grateful for our assistance.

I thanked her for her appreciation – it is the least we could do, I told her that the whole team here at realestate.co.nz offered their sympathy on the failure of the auction – we wish her all the best, and anything we can do along with her agent at Harcourts we are only too happy to do.

You are right the level of interest of the listing is huge – 278 views yesterday 96 so far today – that compares to 35 in total in the prior week – the traffic stats can be viewed online here.

You can see it here amongst lifestyle properties in Otago

They seem to be getting strong traffic intantly – shows the benefit of featured listings pretty dramatically

An excellent suggestion to assist the vendors. Your comments are valuable – I agree that exposure is critical in marketing a property. I do however believe this is not the exclusive domain of real estate agents- professional agents offer so much more than just marketing. In time marketing of property will become commoditised – it is already, by default of Trade me – how could a property have been viewed over 250,000 times for $199 – a TV channel would have charged tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in the past for such exposure.

As to saying that Trade me has educated people to auctions – I would say it has educated people to online auctions for cheap secondhand household goods where the majority of sales are completed, and tens or hundreds of dollars change hands.

When it comes to a property purchase to the value of many hundreds of thousands of dollars the euphoria of online trading auctions is no place for such a property as this case in point ably demonstrates. If it was, do you not think this industry would have built and operated such an online auction based version of realestate.co.nz a long time ago??

I also feel the effort was innovative but -unfortunately- has proven itself to be unsuccessful.

I may not have stated it clearly enough earlier but I think the Trademe auction phenomenon (if I can call it that) does have a relevance for Real Estate today as it has made nearly every section of NZ society hugely aware of both auctions and online marketing as a credible vehicles for selling product.
This in itself legitimises auctioning property as NZers familiarise (or educate) themselves again with auctions. I personally use the trademe auction model as an analogy when I talk to vendors about vendor-funded advertising and using professional Real Estate auctions – Trademe is so well known and visibly parallels some of the great features of auctions eg competition, reserves, vendor controlled deadlines and the theatre of auction etc

I do believe this particular online auction has exposed the property to significantly more people than if they had invested in a more traditional Real Estate Marketing campaign with newspaper, fliers and traditional online listings.
And the level of exposure is what I applauded.

I feel exposing a property as being for sale is a HUGE part of what we do. And I don’t expect the “whole world” will want to buy all properties but we encourage as many people as possible to view/reaserch them…in the same way we encourage neighbours to come through our vendors’ open homes. Not because we genuinely think they will buy the property – BUT because we know they tell friends/family and hope they tell/influence the actual BUYER who is prepared to offer the perfect $$ and on a S&P agreement and actually settle on the property.

Alistair – perhaps http://www.realestate.co.nz could offer these disappointed vendors a complimentary FEATURED LISTING on http://www.realestate.co.nz.
It would be legitimate Real Estate advertising and -if I’m right- will expose their property to genuine property buyers searching the most specific real estate portal in the country.

I am not sure that you can make the assumption that this online auction for a tractor on a $1 reserve is going to be a demonstration of genuine interest for auctions in general.

Tell me I am wrong, but from my perspective as I endeavoured to highlight in the prior post they are not the same at all.

Best of luck to Kylie Anderson and her vendors