I have a passionate love of listening to podcasts. They allow you to so much more effectively use your time to become better informed accessing news and information from around the world brought to you for free through the iTunes service.
So it was I was listening to a podcast the other day from Harvard Business – the title spiked my interest:
Will Monster.com Go the Way of Newspapers?
If you did not know monster.com. it is, or has been up to this point in time, the gorilla when it comes to job searching online in the USA. This podcast was a transcript of a blog post from Tom Davenport who holds the President’s Chair in Information Technology and Management at Babson College. The concept of monster.com relinqishing its mantle on job searching seems inprobable, but that is exactly the premise he suggest could happen. That was enough to hold my attention in listing to his hypothesis.
His premise is that recently aggregator sites have started to erode the power of monster – sites such as SimplyHired, Jobster, Craigs list and of course Google base. Such sites he says have the advanatge of being able to aggregate all listings of jobs rather than just the ones found on Monster.
This naturally got me thinking as to how he would view the real estate market online for certainly in the UK a new entrant Globrix has shaken up the market as an aggregator of content from many websites undertaken by scrapping content. The simple premise of such aggregator sites is that the more comprehensive the content on any one website the more the public will judge that site to be the most valuable to visit. Whilst in the UK Globrix has acheived significant growth it has not dented the #1 incumbent player – Rightmove for 2 reasons.
- Rightmove already has the most comprehensive content with over 90% of all real estate offices subscribing – these offices judge value from the service
- Globrix can only ever provide half the service the public want – scratch the surface and you discover that Globrix is a search site speedily handing you off to another site to search for information. The public find this experience jarring and judge a site on content as much as seemless consistent experience of searching, saving, analysing and enquiring about property. Something that RightMove does better than anyone else.
So what about NZ ?
Well here we have one website for real estate which has over 93% of all the listings of real estate agents – realestate.co.nz. The most comprehensive website for real estate in NZ. As the chart below shows on the catgories of property for sale, be it homes (including sections and lifestyle), farms, commercial property or businesse;s realestate.co.nz holds a more comprehensive selection than Trade me property.
So do we at realestate.co.nz fear we will go the way of the newspapers? – certainly not!
We are focussed to continuing to develop the website to provide the most rewarding and valuable searching experience as a partner in the property buying process, providing the single most comprehensive source of listings of real estate of any NZ website. That is our commitment to the property seekers of NZ and our customers – the real estate profession of NZ.
Having the most property on the website is one thing, showing the stats or traffic that each listing gets in comparison to another websites is another.
Mike,
Nothing hidden here. Every listing on realestate.co.nz and every listing on Trade me property shows the number of views each has had. On realestate.co.nz we go further by graphing the daily traffic and origin of traffic by country – example here
Of course absolute numbers are one thing – relevancy of audience is another. Trade me property benefits from a monthly audience from the main site of over 4 million unique browsers many of whom scan the property on offer through search results – that is how trade me property delivers over 800,000 unique browsers per month.
By contrast realestate.co.nz delivers around 370,000 unique browsers per month – difference being nobody comes to realestate.co.nz looking for a car or boat, or shoes or a kayak.
Quality and quantity two measures – the former of greater value to the real estate industry – demonstrated by greater subscription % of all offices to realestate.co.nz
Thanks for that Alister. I guess it just gets confusing, I view trademe’s property news leters which show the following. So these stats are showing the stats of the trademe site in general or are they unique browser stats for their real estate listings? Maybe there needs to be a clear, consistant and transparent stats guideline so us users can have a clear understanding. At the moment I see two competing websites producing statistic data which benefits their website over their competitors.
On another note do you have the rest of the information from the Nielsen Survey. I’m particularly interested in the “consumer expectations in respect of media and richness of information”
Many thanks
Mike
sorry forgot to add link. “which show the following” http://www.trademe.co.nz/Community/PropertyNewsletter.aspx
Mike
Mike
Let me get back to you on both of these items shortly.
Alistair
I agree that critical mass of information is important – arguably the most important factor in determining success of a website.
But “useability” must be a close second. It has been a constant beef of mine that our website (Harcourts) is not particularly user-friendly – nor for that matter is realestate.co.nz. I am not sure I have any clients who have commented on how easy it was to search – but I have plenty who moan how hard it was!
For example – many people from overseas don’t know the names of suburbs – they want an area – surely having a map that users could identify an area and zoom in and see stuff on the market would be best. Google maps does this – but (as far as I am aware here in NZ) it is a component within other sites.
Are there any consultations with the public over how to improve their experience with realestate.co.nz?
If not there is a risk that google (or someone) will go independant and pull the traffic
I am interested to hear your perspective on this
It’s important to note that even though realestate.co.nz has more listings, Trade Me Property for the last 4 years has rated #1 by traffic, time on site, page impressions and frequency of browsers.
Also given your comments I find it interesting that in the latest annual Real Estate Market Report, sponsored by realestate.co.nz, Trade Me Property was rated 1st in brand rating and the following key measures:
Real estate brand – 1st Trade Me Property.
Real estate website visited in last month – Trade Me Property 1st.
Website functionality rating – Trade Me Property 1st.
Website recommendation score – Trade Me Property 1st.
The 893,000 unique browsers that visited us in July are visiting property listings on Trade Me Property. May I also point out that people that buy cars, boats, shoes and kayaks also buy and sell property. Over 106,000 email enquiries were sent to Trade Me Property listings in July.
These are important measures and a good report card but the key measure for us is the results and the feedback that we get from our clients and browsers. What we will be focusing on from the report is that browsers want more/better quality photos, better address and pricing information.
Brendon Skipper
Head of Trade Me Property
In response to Tim’s remarks re useability, I have found realestate.co very easy to use as I have researched property for rent or purchase in Auckland – an area I don’t know well – yet. The tie in with Zoodle for information on suburbs, (found on the right hand side of any screen)and google when an address is provided help significantly in finding out whether the suburb is right for me, or not. Zoodle’s use of statistics info is particularly helpful. The visits following my research have confirmed the accuracy of the data nicely!
Trademe V Realestate.co, I prefer the latter any day. I find the search parameters easier to use and I don’t have to view content put in by non professionals. Viewing stats on Realeste.co are also easier to find and view and I like the graph on location of viewers.
Brendon makes a very relevant point and one that I want to come back to in presenting more details of the research. The buyers and property searchers have a desire for rich / relevant information – this is the heart of every website.
However for trade me property and realestate.co.nz this issue is not entirely within our control, it is the agents on behalf of vendors that create the content – it is for the agents to better appreciate the need for richer content and higher quality content.
Alistair, thinking of ways to get you closer to 100%, a great way to get private sellers onto your site is to educate them (perhaps via agents) that they only need to be listed with one agent on a ‘general’ listing basis, then they get listed on your site. TradeMe’s model allows private sellers and that gives them a small advantage, an advantage you could close the gap on with a bit of work as I’ve described. If you wanted to.
Speaking of private sellers, in the current buoyant market the best bargains are probably to be had via private sellers. That’s how I would try to buy if I was buying. A reason to scan TradeMe. My wife scans it all the time because she feels she’s getting better aggregation.