propertyextra.com.au - Blog

When you only have a couple of people in an office the communication is normally very good. As an office grows it does not take long for the information and resources to be disseminated to a point that effective communication is often lost. To put it simply, everybody spends far too much time trying to find information and resources that somebody else in the office has when it should be right at your fingertips.
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US-based classified advertising expert Peter Zollman told me this week on the phone that in the US, real estate ad dollars are already moving online as a result of the troubled economy there.

“Real estate agents and real estate advertising are in transition. Online will be a substantial winner and daily newspaper print is going to be a significant loser,” he said.

After our chat, I wondered if what Peter said was also true here in Australia. We haven’t got the economic problems the US has. But, interest rates are rising, the share market has been falling and the real estate markets are uncertain.
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Well it seems the the 2007 BRW Rich list are now all going to hell (wherever that is) . Maybe ABC Learning’s Eddie Groves saw this coming and decided to dwindle his shares the good old fashioned way.

But what are the 7 deadly sins when publishing your vendors listings? Please note, I can update this at my discretion at any time in the future.
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People really don’t want to look for property on a pain-in-the-neck mobile device with poor usability, difficult buttons, a small screen and annoying software.

But all that will soon change. Let me say right now that this post isn’t just more mindless iPhone hype. I don’t think I’ll spring for an iPhone as soon as they become available, but I have no doubt that the iPhone and probably Android, the Google phone software, will finally make real estate search and sales mobile-ready activities.

For the last several years, realestate.com.au has tested partnerships with mobile phone providers. In my opinion, they have never been very successful. I heard that Telstra shut theirs off without even telling realestate.com.au because there was so little traffic that it didn’t make a difference. (more…)

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As we all know, interest rates rose again for the 12^th time and many of the banks are expected to increase rates even more than the 25 base points increase in the official cash rate announced by the Reserve Bank.

Its interesting to note that the reason many banks have and are considering again to increase their rates above the official cash rate has been blamed on the cost of wholesale funds, primarily from the states. I guess nobody at the banks wants to point out at that over the past couple of days the mortgage rates in the US have dropped dramatically from the insane levels of just last month and are expected to drop even further over coming months.
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