Realestate.com has officially.....

[WinstonWolfe]

Yesterday I aimed to leave some feedback on the contact us link and after typing out my suggestions (particularly re: Map searches and Blocks of Units......in case any one from rea.com.au is reading this post) and when I clicked submit it proceeded to a page that was unavailable.

I had a call this arvo from rea.com's customer service manager....Ian Harding. well, that's what he said he was.....he is probably one of many....had been working with the company for...........2 months.....

anyway, he was responding to criticism I left on the facebook thread.
I told him what I thought of their new site rollout/transition. blah blah blah....he did his best to be polite...and asked me for feedback about how I used the site and how I thought it could be improved. He said he'd pass it on up the chain.....I said give me a call on what the response from the chain is.

I think there's part of rea.com that want to hear how power users are using the site, and what we're after. I said I'd like to see several heat maps of Australia, where heat relates to
- rise in average user sessions per listing, via suburb.
- fall in listings per suburb
- fall in bottom end listings per suburb (say under 300k or 350k)
- fall in days on the market per suburb.
all categorized via house, land, apts.

In my view, buyers could then decide to ride the heat up, or dispose when the heat is cooling, or avoid heat and go to some quieter area. This could only help allocate capital more efficiently imho, as the market place would be better informed.

 

[Piston Broke]

How I just simply get what I search for?
That's all I ask.
Search for house only, get houses only.
Search for blocks, then only get blocks.
I have to sift thou REA garbage to find anything.
Dumb REAs list in wrong sections, wrong details, wrong prices, but's it's still re-com-au's job to provide decent search results and givem stick.

 

[Bigtone]

I think there's part of rea.com that want to hear how power users are using the site, and what we're after. I said I'd like to see several heat maps of Australia, where heat relates to
- rise in average user sessions per listing, via suburb.
- fall in listings per suburb
- fall in bottom end listings per suburb (say under 300k or 350k)
- fall in days on the market per suburb.
all categorized via house, land, apts.

In my view, buyers could then decide to ride the heat up, or dispose when the heat is cooling, or avoid heat and go to some quieter area. This could only help allocate capital more efficiently imho, as the market place would be better informed.

that would be very helpful

 

[WinstonWolfe]

BTW, the issues I had last night and this morning are resolved.
Web pages, maps, photos all began rendering properly around 2pm this arvo.
I like the suburb map, and wish it was compulsory to list the address of a property.
Don't like that listings are so big. Would rather squeeze more onto a page so I can filter/screen more in less time.

Since the site started rendering properly, I also decided to upgrade Firefox to 3.6.3...I hadn't upgraded for 6 mths prior because add ins (adblock, flashblock) weren't available for latest editions.

I am still running IE 6.0.2900.5512.xxx and it is running things properly since 2pm as well.

edit:

BTW, what would be great is if rea.com made available some rpdata type data, for free. i.e. previous sales and dates....and how about rates notices and easements, town planning restrictions/requirements, renos etc.

God, it is data the taxpayer has already paid the govt to collect anyway.

 

[JoshyBoi]

Wow! You're suing them?

The Y-man

Well, I thought maybe they'd listen that way? Would you like to join teh class action as a disgruntled user? The basis of our claim is lost opportunity...the horrible layout meant we weren't able to find the bargains and thus missed out on massive CG or awesome yields...or whatever we want to allege...

 

[Jonril]

just jumped on today for a quick browse. All the features/layout I use look like they are back to normal. Glad it is back to "normal"

not sure about the advanced features/filters as I rarely used them.

 

[eKwatee]

I think there's part of rea.com that want to hear how power users are using the site, and what we're after. I said I'd like to see several heat maps of Australia, where heat relates to
- rise in average user sessions per listing, via suburb.
- fall in listings per suburb
- fall in bottom end listings per suburb (say under 300k or 350k)
- fall in days on the market per suburb.
all categorized via house, land, apts.

In my view, buyers could then decide to ride the heat up, or dispose when the heat is cooling, or avoid heat and go to some quieter area. This could only help allocate capital more efficiently imho, as the market place would be better informed.

This supply and demand graph to the lower section of the suburbs data & trend, which can be provided on each suburb by REA, give a little bit of the information you have requested. SEE HERE

 

[Rickardo]

from what i can see, you can no longer search only for a specific number of bedrooms, eg now it's only 2+, 3+ etc. Has anyone gotten around this?

 

[WinstonWolfe]

This supply and demand graph to the lower section of the suburbs data & trend, which can be provided on each suburb by REA, give a little bit of the information you have requested. SEE HERE

Thanks Matt. Yes, I use that data already to calculate user sessions per listing via suburb. It gives me an idea of how hot a burb is. Would be good to get it as a heat map for every burb in a Australia.....and even better, a time series heat map so you can see whether the heat is rising or falling.

 

[dusty]

from what i can see, you can no longer search only for a specific number of bedrooms, eg now it's only 2+, 3+ etc. Has anyone gotten around this?

This is my number one gripe with the new realestate.com.au! All of my email alerts are now useless as they were for specific numbers of bedrooms.

Many other things suck about the redesign, but this is my number one.

 

[Frizzle]

Feature Property on re.com

No sure that there is much distinction for the $115 + cost of having your listing as a feature property ... aside from being on the front pages of course, they blend in much the same as a "standard" listing now.

 

[eternit]

also i used to do a search on "block of units" which is not available anymore

 

[WinstonWolfe]

In the absence of region searches, I've messed with putting in large numbers of postcodes, like 100+.

The search engine seems to be variable in accepting more than 100. I've had as many as 230 accepted. Probably depends on how busy their servers are before they time out and give this message

"We are currently unable to process your search. Please try again later."



So who is going to manually enter 100+ postcodes I hear you say?

This xls with macro, can be used to generate rea.com.au appropriate strings.

You can either

enter a postcode at the top and generate 1000 sequential postcodes, and select the part of the string you want

OR

copy/paste Aussie postcodes from the included worksheet.



Also, make sure you have the right state highlighted if in state mode, for the postcodes entered.

hope this helps to overcome the region search limitation.

edit:
when rea.com returns search results, you may get a message like below, but the results still seem complete.

"We could not understand the locations 810, 811, 812, 813, 814, 815, 821, 822, 828, 829, 830, 831, 832, 835, 836, 837, 838, 840, 841, 845, 846, 847, 850, 851, 852, 853, 854, 860, 861, 862, 870, 871, 872, 880, 881, 885, 886, 906, 907, 909, 1001, 1002, 1003, 1004, 1005, 1006, 1007, 1008, 1009, 1010, 1011, 1020, 1021, 1022, 1023, 1025, and 1026. Below are results for Properties for sale in Cullen Bay, NT 820................"

 

[the.j]

Within 1 hour of their 'launch' I hit an email to complain about REA's really crappy photo loading times, and thereafter promptly went to Domain.

I have found out since that DOmain is affiliated with http://www.nestoria.com.au/ which is interesting to see non REA listings that are genuinely for sale - how many opportunities have I missed on the 'non-REA sponsored' listings??!!

Seems like the real beneficiaries of REA (ie - real estate agents) are cranky too... ( have a look at http://www.business2.com.au/2010/04...n-innovation-and-announces-premiere-property/)

REA might have lost the plot - satisfy shareholders at the expense of customers and stakeholders

 

[Spectre]

Domain allowing private listings

This out today

http://ht.ly/1Pst0


"Domain.com.au Agrees to Upload Over 1700 Private Sellers in One Go
by Greg Vincent, on 18th May, 2010
• 102 Comments
38
► Retweet
It will be very interesting to see how the real estate community reacts to domain.com.au’s decision to allow some 1739 Private Seller listings to be uploaded onto their site by buymyplace.com.au.

Property Portal Watch author Alice Allen announced that “Listings from For Sale By Owner portal buymyplace.com.au have now been added to domain.com.au,”

For years now I’ve wondered why domain.com.au would use an agent subscription based model and position themselves in the marketplace as a real estate industry portal who also allows Private Sellers to upload onto their site for a nominal fee?

They seem to want to have their cake and eat it too. But unfortunately, I think this decision to upload listings from buymyplace.com.au will highlight their strategy to have a foot in both camp. It could easily be interpreted by agents that they are stabbing them in the back or biting the very hand that feeds them.

In my book, in the real estate portal world you’re either one thing or you’re another. And if domain.com.au are going to take further subscription payments from agents then they need to decide.

Domain.com.au you’re either an industry portal or you’re a Private Seller portal. I don’t believe that you can continue to be both and remain relevant into the future.

On top of all this, the timing of this decision couldn’t come at a worse time, especially after the extensive changes that have just been made to the realestate.com.au site.

The new changes to realestate.com.au haven’t been overwhelmingly popular with users and agents.

Without the benefit of statistics, but from reading lots of the feedback via social network sites it appeared that domain.com.au may have actually made up some ground on REA in the past few weeks as many property seekers jumped across to use domain’s site.

I’m not sure whose decision this was but I don’t think it’s going to go over too well within the real estate community."

 

[wokka1]

Unable (still) to delete anything from my saved property list. 3 emails to support since the changes.

Problem is if I start using Domain or realestateview do I risk missing listings due to RE.coms' larger market share ?

Wokka.

 

[rodimus]

realestate.com.au is a shiit website anyway, only allows agents to post ads, not home owners.

It's all a cyber syndicate to force sellers to use agents.

 

[cloudyday]

I have some design experience and I can say the new interface is better than the old one in terms of user experience.

 

[wobbycarly]

I have some design experience and I can say the new interface is better than the old one in terms of user experience.

Which is why there's been soooo much positive feedback, and threads titled "re.com.au is better now"?

Have to disagree with you, sorry. To me, it's cluttered and there's not enough differentiation between where the actual properties are displayed vs where the ads start. Just a couple of points from a more casual user.

 

[random]

Well , it's Saty & I have that much on but , I had to drop in here for something , saw this thread & MUST put in my 2 bobs worth.
Hopefully , RE.com see's this thread & comes to their damn senses.
As I said in the other thread , once again we have Aussies trying to be smarter than everyone else . It wasn't broke so why bloody try fixing it.

It's really making me sick , it's as slow as a wet week , only works right through when it feels like it , plastered with bloody ads from a/h to breakfast time , can't seem to save the same searches or ad more prop's to a page so that your not there all day , it's got that many flashing damn ads all over it your vision gets lost in it all.I'm an ex signwriter & that's what we called a way way too busy a view .
I just finished reloading it 6 times trying to bring up what - the agents phone number.
It was so busy loading up all of it's ads and garbage that it couldn't even bring through a damn mob' ph number & then it just seized up after 6 tries . I had to get it from the ph book in the end .
Me vedy p'd off indeed , they've ruined a good site once again , seems to be the trend lately.

I feel better now .
Actually I think I came in & moaned last time it gave me the s'ts too , owell.

Cheers