propertyextra.com.au - Blog

A few months ago I did a short article on Copycat, a nifty little software tool for real estate agents who struggle to write imaginative copy for their real estate listings. A new kid on the block is reallysold.com.au which is a sort of up market copy software tool that costs only $1.95 per week (paid quarterly in advance) and offers over 7000 phrases.

Copycat is FREE of course but reallysold.com.au does look a lot more professional and claims to have a bigger more sophisticated database. There will be more of these kinds of tools in the future, but the winner will be the copy company that creates API’s (application program interfaces) that allows software companies like HubOnline and Portplus and real estate agencies- franchises the ability to integrate the software into their own systems.

API’s allow programmers to build on top and into their own systems and this is how these types of companies grow. Take a tour your self at either of these sites and see what you think!

Welcome to the new Business2.com.au website. I would like to thank Jen Germann - a designer I use for a great deal of my work. For me Jen is a revelation, so thank you Jen! A great deal of effort was placed into making this site as slick as it is. We have not finished yet, and business2.com.au will be work in progress. We have not gone for a range of new features, but we have gone for a cleaner, faster website with a sexy new look. I hope you like it!

Contributors
You will also notice that I am no longer the sole editor/contributor of this website. I welcome Dave Platter from the REA Group and also Glenn Batten from Nerang First National and I am sure they will both contribute to this website.

We will not stop there and I am looking for more contributors to this forum and have extended an invitation to a few companies and individuals and I hope they will all come on board. If you think you can contribute then click here and I will get back to you in good time. I cannot accept anyone, but what I will seek to do is to get representatives from a wide cross section of the real estate and technology industry. If you would like to be a contributor to this website feel free to fill in our online form.

Dave Platter from REA: I am sure he will cop a fair bit just for being from REA and I understand their will be a bit of promotional stuff posted by Dave and REA. If you only had a look at my in-box there is also a great deal of new initiatives coming from REA, but I will leave that for Dave to announce on here. I have invited all major portals to contribute and I will hope to have some more news next week.

Glenn Batten from Nerang First National has been a valuable contributor to this site for a long period of time and I look forward to more of his insights over the coming months. So I welcome Glenn and I am sure he will provide some great stories and articles over time.

Independence
I can assure all readers that no matter who joins as a contribute to this site, I will maintain my independence and still post my thoughts on all the happenings in the industry. I have added new contributors because I think it is time to expand the views and I would also like this site to be a place where agents and industry insiders can visit everyday to read articles and post comments.

Commenting
As always I love dissent, as long as it is clean and measured, so if you do not agree with any articles, then get stuck in and post your comments.

Google has just announced that it will be bringing its ” Street View” images to Australia with images captured over the next several months and become available for viewing later this year.

Google Street View is an added feature of their highly popular Google Maps that provides 360° panoramic views of the street at ground level. It was launched in May this year in the US for a limited number of cities which has been slowly expanded.

The images are taken by specially modified cars that take the images from a rooftop mounted camera and record the location of each photos by GPS. When taking millions of images at street level of a city you are bound to catch some amazing things and there are many websites that have sprung up to highlight some of the best images and one of the best is Google Street View Sightings. Google has caught abortion protests, break and enters and people in compromising positions. Australian privacy laws are a little more strict than the US and it is expected that Google will have to blur the faces and car number plates of anyone photographed.

Google Street View allows a lot of possibilities for real estate agents. In the US some agents are providing a link direct to the street view of a property on their website so potential buyers can get a feel for the neighbourhood.

Newspapers seem to be taking hit after hit at the moment as “New Media” is constantly creeping into its traditional core market. A new eBook reader called Kindle has just been released by Amazon in the US which points to the fact that the traditional newspaper’s days are numbered along with the books and magazines.

Print advertising is down billions of dollars every year as companies switch more and more of their advertising mix to the Internet. In the US last year more was spent by employers in recruitment advertising than on print advertising. I’ll bet there are plenty of other traditional print advertising markets that have suffered a similar fate. As an industry with a huge investment in print advertising we have some big changes over the next few years .

We now have Internet only newspapers like the Brisbane Times aimed squarely at Generation Y and thanks to Kindle you can over 250 newspapers and 80,000 books delivered to you for a fraction of the cost of their paper counterparts.

Sony brought us one of the first eBbook readers but Kindle has taken it several steps further. Amazon leveraged the internet to become the world’s largest book store, but as the internet has evolved they can obviously see the writing on the wall for its book business so it has tried to tackle the problem in a couple of ways. The first was to utilize their excellent shopfront software to diversify their product range which means that they sell just about everything now but the kitchen sink. The second was to create its own eBook reader so it leads the digital delivery of books, magazines and newspapers.

Whilst Kindle is not perfect it does seem to have fixed most of the common problems with digital book readers to date. The first problem was the screens were more like a computer screen than a paper. Consumers wanted it to be more like a book than a computer. People got eye strain looking at them for too long, which is obviously a problem if your trying to read something like War and Peace. Another big problem was the delivery of the books. Consumers were bound to their computer to sync and transfer files which limited its effectiveness.

Kindle’s screen looks like the page of a book except for the fact that font sizes can be changed on the fly allowing those with poor eyesight to increase the print size of screen. The screen is not backlit like a computer screen and there is no glare or reflections. In fact if you reading it in a dark room you will need a light on just like a real book.

Books, Newspapers and Magazines are delivered in just one minute across an always on wireless broadband connection that is included at no cost and the unit will store over 200 books before you need to install an additional memory card. This means your newspapers are ready to read the moment you wake up in the morning and as soon as you finish reading one book, you can browse for others in the online book shop and be reading a replacement all in just a few minutes.

The interesting part is that ads are not a feature of the system. You get the newspaper articles and the magazine articles only. You can get Time Magazine for $1.49 and a months supply of the Wall Street Journal for $9.99. And you get free access to Wikipedia Encyclopedia, leading blogs and a stack of other features too long to list here.

Is it perfect ? Not by a long shot but version 2 and 3 will only improve it I am sure. Being grayscale only for the moment some magazine articles with colour graphics just don’t work properly (maybe that’s why Time is only $1.49 per month). But where do you get one…. Well, quite simply you can’t, not right now at least. They are sold out and its on back order at $US399 each just like the launch of some other favourites before it, the iPod and the iPhone. And just like these, Kindle is all white.

Gutenburg brought us the printing press around 1430 but if Kindle and others can transform newspapers, books and magazines into a “New Media” as quick as the iPod has changed the music scene since its launch in 2001 then the shape of real estate advertising is going to be even more Internet centric than it is now.

Dave from the REA Group here.

My thanks to Peter for the invitation to post on his blog. I’ve been an avid follower of it and am happy to support his efforts to make business2 even better. I’ll do my best to contribute something positive.

I didn’t want my first post to be about me or the REA Group. Instead, I thought I would post on the most fascinating article I’ve read about real estate in the last several years.

When most real estate investors talk about buying for the long term, they mean 5, 10 or 25 years. Only the Catholic Church and the the Windsors’ seem to hold property for several centuries at a whack.

Are those property holdings the key to these institutions’ wealth? Apparently not, according to a study by a Dutch economist.

He looked at the price history of a single street in Amsterdam and concluded that over the long term (4 centuries) property sort of sucks as an investment. (Not that you’ll be alive to complain about it.)

Real property values in the study went up a mere 0.2 percent per year since 1625, worse than the stingiest bank savings account. (Yet, they tripled in the last couple of decades.) Over time, home prices rise and fall, rise and fall. And when they fall, they fall pretty much back to where they started 50, 100 or 400 years earlier. This is true at least in neighbourhoods with the same “quality index”–that is, areas that are always the nice part of town, or always the bad one.

Of course, rocketing prices aren’t everything. There is also “value” in the tax deductions that can come with property and in having a place to live. (Not to mention the first time buyers’ bonus.)

Prince Charles excepted, not many homebuyers today give a damn that their property might not have appreciated by 2207. What we care about is 2010 or 2020. It’s 2 or 5 or 10 years down the road that matters.

Still, it’s fascinating once and a while to step back and look at the long term. Really bad stuff does happen, and when it does, there is often a collapse in real estate.

We may never see another major collapse in Australian home prices in our careers or lifetimes. Or we might.

In either case, what’s really amazing is that real estate agents will find a way to keep the market functioning, to help people keep buying and selling their homes, and at the same time to make a living for themselves.

That’s an achievement for the history books.

Sorry for the blandness, we are preparing for a new site launch this week.

It is a general consensus that real estate agents have the worst logos out of any major industry group that has a mature online presence. Looking at a list of agents on any portal and you will soon see that agent logos are in general an eyesore.

Franchise groups top out as the worst in my opinion. There seems to be a lack of innovation in bothy font use and colours for logos. Oh and if I see another roof in a logo I am going to on a rampage!

To me a logo should be clean and clear with a crisp use of colours. A good starting point should be Kuler for your colour scheme and there are many professional logo designers out there. A logo does not have to describe anything, it just has to be a clear indication of your company, it does not even have to be relevant.

Great logos are logos that a person sees once and takes in information, so that when they see it again they know who it represents, that’s all, nothing more!

So tell me who do you think has the best and worst logos in real estate?