twicetwice.net

GOOGLE DOES REAL ESTATE

If you haven't heard the news already, Google have recently announced a new feature to their Google Maps application, where they are adding real estate for sale as part of their search results. 

What this means is that users are able to log into the Google Maps website, search for properties they're interested in, and the results will be populated on Google Maps.

Users are able to filter results based on price range, how many bedrooms, bathrooms, carports, and property size.  Because all data is plotted on Goggle Maps, users can pan around surrounding suburbs, and view their properties using Street View.  All this to give the user context around the area they're interested in without leaving their seat, and all done visually. 

The data plotted on the website is from a combination of existing real estate sites (which Google will host for free) and in conjunction with The Real Estate Institute of Western Australia and homehound.com.au, 

One of the big real estate sites in Australia (domain.com.au - owned by Fairfax Media) have decided that they currently won't be providing listings to Google.  The quote in the Sydney Morning Herald from John Brand (GM of Key Categories at Fairfax Media) is, "We are quite confident that we provide a better service than Google is offering. [...] We are a specialist property portal and we think this will stand us in good stead going forward"

What domain.com.au have failed to realise (and same with traditional print media companies) is that Google isn't their competitor. 

A lot of print companies who have moved online have tried very hard to stop sites like Google News indexing their stories, claiming that it will drive traffic away from their sites as users will flock to Google News instead of to nytimes.com or The Wall Street Journal.  To prevent this, what they've done is erected pay walls, where content is made unavailable unless a payment is made.

The problem with this is that those sites are driven by advertisers, not subscriptions.  nytimes.com have dropped part of their pay wall in realisation of this, because what they've discovered is that to get more advertising revenue, they need more people reading their site.  To get more people reading their site, their content has to be discoverable, both by Google and by people who would link to their site.  With content that's easily indexed by Google, and with a large number of people linking to their site, they'd get more traffic which in turn they can make more profit, which can be used to pay the excellent journalists they hire to write their articles, which can be used to generate more excellent content, which can be linked more, etc. 

News sites are in a unique situation compared to other advertising driven sites, as there's a lot of content which can be linked to and searched for.  Limiting that content in any way reduces the scope in which people can "accidentally" land on the their site, and therefore affects their bottom line.

This links back to Google Maps doing real estate, where I said domain.com.au has failed to realise that their competitor isn't Google Maps.  Google Maps just aggregates all real estate listings from a collection of sites.  Like a public billboard, with infinite space and an unlimited audience, and one which automatically collects, sorts, classifies, and publishes content without anyone having to do a single thing.

domain.com.au on the other hand makes their profit by charging people for listings and by advertising on their site.  Their competitors are sites like realestate.com.au, which also make a profit by the same means.

To elaborate.  What domain.com.au sell is a place where customers can advertise their properties on, and who know that by placing their listings with domain.com.au, they're going to get more potential buyers for their properties because of it. 

If domain.com.au are limiting the exposure of these properties, customers will stop advertising with them because they know they can go to sites like homehound.com.au, place an ad there, and not only get visitors from regular homehound.com.au users, but also from Google Maps users who might stumble upon their listings.

I have no doubt that The Real Estate Institute of Western Australia and homehound.com.au will benefit greatly because of their association to Google. 

In effect, what Google have done is levelled the playing field and made comparisons easier between different real estate listing sites, and also real estate agents.  This, in a way, allows smaller real estate listing sites, and also real estate agents to dramatically increase their visibility. 

If I were domain.com.au, I would be jumping on this as soon as I can, and potentially partnering with Google to see how I can improve the speed of which my listings come online, and also extract the most accurate and best formatted search listings for display.