New free-to-list property portal thehomepage.com.au says it has already climbed to eighth place among real estate classifieds websites, and goes on to claim that it is the fastest growing real estate website in Australia.
thehomepage.com.au points to statistics from the Audit Bureaux of Australia to support these claims, reporting 157,808 monthly unique visitors and 661,338 page impressions. According to further Nielsen statistics available in thehomepage.com.au’s information package for agents, the top 10 Australian real estate websites for April 2011 are as follows:
1. realestate.com.au (6,014,517 unique visitors)
2. domain.com.au (3,015,426)
3. stayz.com.au (762,414)
4. homehound.com.au (492,980)
5. realcommercial.com.au (371,669)
6. reiwa.com.au (251,916)
7. homepriceguide.com.au (303,954)
8. thehomepage.com.au (157,166)
9. rent.com.au (114,699)
10. commercialrealestate.com.au (95,412)
Despite this fierce competition, thehomepage.com.au says it is a “serious player” in the Australian marketplace, and promises to “lift the costly constraints of what is otherwise available to agents.” The portal says it currently has 1,650 active agents and 77,000 active listings from sources including Ray White, Raine & Horne, Elders and LJ Hooker.
“Both the volume of the listings and the traffic is growing faster than we originally anticipated, which is terrific,” says thehomepage.com.au CEO Ben Stockdale. ”Feedback from the real estate community has been exceptional. The free listing guarantee and the simplicity of the new design are clearly really working for buyers and sellers.”
thehomepage.com.au says it will not display “irrelevant paid-priority listings cluttering the search,” however featured listings are available to agents, along with banner advertising for particular suburbs and a property website creation package.
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{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Congratulations to Ben Stockdale and team. A great fresh looking site and search function and just check out their promotional video – it’s a real buzz..
Have been watching its progress from day one and it didn’t need an IPO of $55m to get there.
Great to have more competition but i am very secptical about the agent numbers they are boasting, I have looked for a few agents in my imediate area and found while they may have an account with thehomepage there is no listings. Now i am not sure whether or not these agents have agreeded to open an account with thehomepage or not. It just raises a bit of suspicion with me!
Actually i have just spoken to a local real estate agent who knows nothing about thehomepage, yet all his listings seem to advertised on the site. Is this a case of property scraping????
Hi Steve,
Thanks for taking the time to look at the site.
All the listings we have either been added by XML through opt in and set up through the likes of CA and Portplus or loaded manually after the agent has requested an account.
Some of the offices have been opted in by their franchise group and others have been set up so long ago that the person that set it up has forgotten.
We DO NOT scrape listings and just wanted to make that very clear as we’ve been working very hard to do the right thing by agents.
If you’d like to call and discuss my number is 1300 377 037 and we would love to hear from you.
Cheers
Ben
Ben,
I applaud you for not scraping.
The issue of accuracy and currency of listings on sites is not only a problem you may have, but it exists with all portals. Some more than others.
We need to do all we can to ensure that our industry has good standards of practice paricularly as a lot of agents do not know where they are sending their listings, their office staff do not always update correctly nor remove all sold properties. We have noticed on our site that in recent times there have been a number of agents that have either sold their agencies, walked away from them or changed their franchises . These factors also have the impact of listings details being inaccurate and or not current. No doubt you have the same issues.
To try to be the best we can be we have established a six monthly audit of our site listings and will have our results within the next week or so.
Would be interested to know whether other portals have implemented internal audits.