The Australian real estate industry is serviced mainly by several large franchises such as L. J. Hooker, Ray White and Elders.
Online research indicates that these franchises rely on real estate portals such as realestate.com.au domain.com.au and homehound.com.au to send them prospective buyers for the homes they are selling.
The process goes something like this, a real estate office gains a property to sell, they then pay a listing fee to list the property on the major portals.
Because these portals are used by so many agencies and have thousands of properties listed at any one time, search engines rank the portals in the top positions in their search results.
Performing this example search at Google “real estate canberra” produces listings that show real estate portals controlling the first page of search results.
Real estate portals now control search rankings so continually increase listing fees they charge agencies to list properties and agencies are starting to scream about the rising charges.
Unfortunately agencies feel helpless because if they don’t pay the fees and list the properties they lose out to their competitors who are listing. It’s become a vicious circle.
Agencies also find the situation frustrating because they know they are building the portals brands whilst paying to do it.
Let me suggest that franchised agencies do have an option available that would eventually kill their reliance on portals and boost their own brand at the same time.
The solution = Personal Branding
The large franchisors have hundreds of real estate branches and collectively those branches have thousands of agents all operating as individuals on behalf of the branch.
Those individual agents should be encouraged to register domains and establish websites to be used for personal branding.
The websites could also be used to list properties of clients, publish local real estate news and provide information to prospective clients about the particular agent and the franchise he or she works for.
The agent would also be encouraged to link their websites to social networks such as facebook and Twitter.
Eventually this would see a franchise gaining brand expansion through thousands of websites and social network pages.
All these sites would be linking to the official franchise website and branch websites and eventually search engines such as Google would shove those websites up the search rankings. That’s how Google works, they say as much on their webmaster pages. They advise you to create a website with unique content, gain links and provide links to similar websites. There would be thousands of links being created to real estate franchise websites which would see their search rankings go through the roof.
Real estate CEO’s should be asking their marketing guru’s why such strategies are not in place or be prepared to see their listing fees on a never ending increase. Only competition will drive down fees and they franchises are the only ones who can create that competition
#1 by real estate on June 28th, 2009
While you are right about the portals owning the front page for a phrase such as, real estate Canberra, look at what happens if you search a far more competitive phrase like - real estate.
You’ll notice that my site PropertyNow is ranked number four and beating MyHome, Home Hound, JustListed and everyone else including LJHooker, Ray White and so on.
So it’s not a fait accompli that the real estate portals have to rule the roost.
Smaller operators who know what they are doing can compete very successfully. We have a budget probably one thousandth the size of the major portals and still manage to dominate for a dozen of the toughest real estate phrases out there.
I hope this gives some other website owners confidence.
Congratulations on a very attractive and user friendly informative blog.
Andrew Blachut
PropertyNow
#2 by admin on July 7th, 2009
Andrew you are to be congratulated on taking on the major portals and showing what can be achieved.
Your efforts should serve as an inspiration to anyone taking up the challenge of creating a professional web presence.
I also notice you offer social network bookmarking, great approach that and I actually tweeted your url.
#3 by John Townsend on July 7th, 2009
Every real estate agent in the country should be jumping at this.
Your proposition is logical and makes sense.
The service you are offering is also great value.
Not only should real estate agents register their own name as a domain but also that of their children.
Personal branding is the new business card of the future.