The new REA CEO looks likely to be announced this week. I have had a number of people send me emails as to who they think it is going to be.
Can they keep the growth going at the same clip? Will they simply be a News Ltd puppet? Will it be a woman? Tell me who you think it could be and why!
On Thursday evening I had a phone hookup with Simon Baker, former Managing Director of Realestate.com.au. We spoke about a range of issues and I will place some excerpts from the interview here. Simon recently departed from Realestate.com.au in the typical pathetic fashion that large organisations feel necessary and from his blog My CEO Life Simon explained his departure.
“I was summonded to a hotel room in town, asked for my access pass and told not to go back to the office and that my desk would be packed up and couriered to me - 7.5 years over in a flash. I was not to say goodbye to the team.”
Since that date Simon has been inundated with offers and judging by the response was very popular amongst his team. Simon is still a large shareholder of realestate.com.au so I am sure he will want to see continued growth from this company. You have got to give credit where it is due, the company now has a market capitalisation of over 500 million and employs some 750 people.
Realestate.com.au has a number of challenges ahead of them, not only trying to keep growth running along nicely, but also making its international businesses profitable (nearly all the profit comes from Australia).
There was no malice in this interview towards REA and he answered all questions openly.
So here is the interview. (more…)
Back in November the Google Vans were seen running around some of our capital cities photographing the streets to provide a 360 degree panoramic view right down at the street level. Today Google Street View goes live in Australia but what everyone assumed at the time was that like the US, we would only have the large capital cities on Street View. Newspapers are reporting that Google’s goal is to map virtually all streets in Australia including smaller and possibly even major highways.
For the next week we will be no doubt be bombarded with comments in the media about privacy concerns the same as when Google Maps was initially released but it will not take long to die down.
Personally I have found that up till now mapping has not been as a bigger impact with real estate online as thought it was going to be but Street View has the potential to become huge. Street View will allow buyers to really narrow down the field when looking for homes when used on top of the substantial number of internal photos already on most listings.
What a fantastic tool for our industry and there are dozens of way an agent can use this. The race will be on between portals and networks to integrate this feature into their websites.
Editor Note: Domain had this up and running yesterday
Inman News has reported that the LA Times newspaper is ceasing its publication of its weekly newspaper section. A section that has been a feature of the paper for over a century. Read the full article here.
Like many newspapers around the world, the decline in revenues due to the take up of online technologies would have been one of the factors but I would suggest it was further accelerated by the shocking real estate market in the states at the moment. I cant see too many agents throwing money at any sort of advertising whilst they are not selling anything.
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REA Group today announced the departure of CEO and Managing Director - Simon Baker, effective immediately. Chief Financial Officer Georg Chmiel has been appointed as acting CEO until a replacement is announced.
This comes as a little bit of a shock, I honestly thought Simon would be around until he was poached by another company. The Chairman of REA Group Richard Freudenstein said,
“Over the past seven years REA has grown from a single Australian website into a world-leading online property company, with operations in 10 countries and publishing 22 websites and 8 print publications. Now the Board feels it is time for new leadership to take the business to the next level. The Board would like to thank Simon for his contribution to this success and we wish him well in his future endeavours.”
This announcement comes on top of some pretty impressive results. REA’s results for the fiscal year ended in June are astonishingly good.
- Revenue of between $152 million and $156 million (up by 41% to 46%)
- EBITDA of between $35 million and $37 million (up by 49% to 57%)
- More than 22,400 paying agents as at 30 June 08 (up by 5,400 paying agents from 30 June 07)
The New Replacement
Well if you look at the above figures, it is a pretty big ask. My guess if the board want to continue with this growth, then the next CEO will last less than 12 months, as I cannot see that % of growth continuing.
Simon Baker
I have dealt with Simon Baker on a number of occasions over the years and whilst we disagreed on a range of issues, he has always been available for a chat. I wish him well in his future endeavours. He will have leave big shoes and even higher expectations for his successor.
We are all too busy looking forward that we sometimes forget to look back.
I needed to find an old article recently in the archives recently and came across some articles that I thought would be worth a revisit. I started around 18 months ago and looked forward about a year and came up with the following little gems:-
This technology sandpit as REA call it is as Peter pointed out at the time, a complete rip off Google Labs and appears to have dont nothing since the day it was launched. Not even a vista sidebar gadget. The lack of action appears to make a mockery of the original “Global Innovator” tag they put on themselves at the time. My browser tells me this page has not been updated for around 9 months or so.
2007 looked as though it was going to be Google Real Estate’s year but not only did it not arrive, but we are on the back half of 2008 and there seems no solution in sight. Will it still happen?
Zero Agents produced a private selling site with a bit of style however in hindsight the anti agent rhetoric has proven to be full of hot air, at least in our neck of the woods. I seen my first zeroagents sign the other day. Has anybody seen zeroagents make an impact in their marketplace?
Realestateworld.com.au has been slowly building up their presence in the market, a few nights ago Win TV aired this peice on Realestateworld.com.au and their paper property guide. Its seems quite a few real estate agents jumped off the Fairfax owned property guide and went with Real Estate World.
More competition means lower prices and there are endless markets across Australia where this can have a huge effect on the big media operators News Limited and Fairfax. Click on link below to watch video.
Fairfax Digital have been wrapped over the knuckles by the ACCC and have agreed not to advertise as ‘FREE’ a new mobile search service launched by Domain.com.au.
Using the advertised service users of the site could view properties from domain.com.au on their mobile phone (http://m.domain.com.au)and receive ‘free’ SMS alerts. Only one problem, SMS alerts actually cost the user 0.55c per alert and of course downloading or viewing listings on your mobile phone could also incur charges under most pathetic data plans offered by Telco’s, which is nothing short of pathetic.
I have a spanking new 16G iPhone and the service is quite good. Pity that about a 1/4 of the screen is taken up by ads from Commonwealth Bank and links on property pages to Home Loans (which by big thumb clicked on average 3 times per listing by accident). Still it is another one up on REA and I have to say the RSS feed service from Domain.com.au (for searches) is a beauty and saves a lot of time for myself/my friends and this has been up for a long time now and not replicated on REA.
So apart from a totally misleading advert (who from Fairfax seriously thought this one would get past the umpire?) it is quite a nice little service. I am still completely unconvinced about mobile phones for real estate - despite so many companies pushing it as I have not seen anything truly ground breaking (or useful) in this space.
In other news: Cuil goes live
A new search engine developed by some seasoned ex Google employees went live. Cuil.com is the new service and it is glaringly lacking in Australian content but getting some serious coverage on news websites. Has some nice features, but nothing really exciting here.
Seattle based Internet marketing firm SEOMoz launched its new Trifecta tool this week. This tool tries to measure the importance of a website, it collates a number of factors including Google Page Rank, incoming links, news articles and traffic sources - such as Alexa.
It is a pretty rough guide, but in principal it should work reasonable well. Many companies want this space, because with it comes advertisers….and they pay. Google, Yahoo and MSN are all getting in on the act as well.
This survey is all about real estate, and what they have tried to do is put together a big list of all of the major players in the market, you can read it here, however a list is provided below. Australia’s own Realestate.com.au is actually ranked number 4, which is pretty impressive.
One of the comments on my recent post about virtual agents was from Teena Andrews, an agent with Coldwell Banker Property Direct in Brisbane. Teena is a Road Warrior who almost never sets foot into her agency’s actual office. In this interview, she tells us more about being an agent who has dispensed with the storefront office.
There are some fascinating things in here, so it’s well worth a read. For example, Teena feels she gets more leads than the office-based agents.Read on to find out why.
NOTE: Because Teena is a guest on this blog, I would like to ask the more aggressive commentators on business2.com.au to be gentle to Teena and grateful that she has been willing to share a bit of herself with us.