Posted by Rob Honeycombe on 19 April 2010
More future-gazing this week and here’s another innovation that may soon change the way we sell and lease Brisbane real estate.
Geo-fencing is not new technology. Using GPS systems you create a virtual boundary fence in a real world geographic area, and are sent an alert when a device crosses the ‘fence’. It’s used to track Kenyan elephants – when they pass a certain checkpoint the park rangers get an SMS. Stolen cars can be remotely turned off using these systems and Americans use it to keep an eye on their kids (sounds perfect for teenage daughters!) And it may soon be on a real estate portal near you.
Imagine you’ve registered all your criteria for your desired home (bedroom numbers, price etc) and walking through your preferred neighbourhood one morning you get an SMS to tell you you’re about to pass a new listing that matches. The next open home time is included or you can reply to have the agent to call and organise your inspection. Finding Brisbane real estate on your phone is no longer new, but this is an electronic tap on the shoulder – you no longer need to do the searching. A basic GPS matched system, it’s not a complicated process and we understand several US portals are close to implementation.
Recent innovations in property marketing have been all about increased availability of info – better real estate mapping, virtual reality video overlays and broader search criteria. All are designed to help a buyer or tenant cut through the clutter and see only the listings they want. Geo-fencing is immediate, local and specific to your personal needs so we’d expect it to be a real hit.
Meantime local portal behemoth realestate.com.au launched its new ‘face’ this month and the industry collectively stifled a yawn. There are some good ‘about-time’ improvements, such as finally allowing buyers to search from the first page, rather than 2-clicking. For the most part though it’s only a tweak on the old version.
Good to see the addition of dynamic mapping (Google’s big innovation that they’ve now matched) which means you’ll be offered results outside your search area. We’re guessing this will see increased interest in some suburbs where a neighbouring address has a dearer price point. Suddenly suburb boundaries won’t be as relevant and it’s likely more and more buyers will use mapping as their search tool of choice.
What do you think of the ‘new’ realestate.com.au? We’d love to hear your comments.
Tags: Brisbane home buyers, dynamic real estate mapping, Google Maps, GPS real estate mapping, property geo-fencing, selling a house Brisbane, selling an apartment Brisbane, technology, www.realestate.com.au
Posted in real estate marketing | No Comments »
Posted by Rob Honeycombe on 4 December 2008
Depending on your point of view the USA are ahead of us in many industries. In housing, and certainly in real estate service, we keep an eye out for their genuine innovations. Two of our team has just returned from Florida where, along with 21,000 American realtors, they attended their Association’s annual conference. So here’s some of the latest from the land of the Big Mac:
Online everything. Their use of the web in real estate is miles ahead, with much richer content on the properties, their neighbo(u)rhoods and the realtors themselves. One site even charts the map location of all nearby registered pedophiles! Home buyers and tenants are armed with enormous quantities of info, they’re overwhelmed with choice and in such a crowded marketplace only realtors with innovative marketing are helping their clients’ properties stand out.
Blogging is the great opportunity for sharing with millions of people (or just your mum if it’s purely self-promotional) and a handful of agents are doing this well, providing useful and entertaining content. One seminar speaker credited Obama’s presidential success to a savvy online campaign with viral email content, blog pages and genuine interactivity where voters felt their opinions were heard.
TV’s in bathrooms. With the average American watching more than 8 hours of TV every day (Australia averages 3.2) it’s pretty much mandatory for new U.S. bathrooms to include at least one flatscreen. Video is taking over the online world too with content quickly moving away from long paragraphs of text. Many American buyers are finding their next home on YouTube and through other social media sites.
A market that’s bottomed. Setting aside some positive thinking (famous for it those Americans) we got a genuine sense the approx 20% drop in house prices was at it’s worst. Volumes of sales have improved enough to give confidence (up 29% in California’s Orange County one realtor told us) while banks are staying the executions on the 1 in 6 of mortgages that are “upside down”, that is, the debt’s more than the house value.
A banking system that’s the butt of jokes. Home owners unable to make their repayments are free to simply mail the keys back to the bank (called “jingle mail”) and a bad credit rating is the only consequence for a default. Loans at 100% created massive demand and builders quickly oversupplied the nation. One Los Angeles realtor explained it like this: “Some of those folks could never afford a home, then they could, and now they can’t again. They had some years living the great American dream so good luck to them!” He agreed their banking model was “craaazy mannnn”.
Tags: banking, real estate blogging, technology, USA
Posted in real estate marketing, trends in Brisbane property | 1 Comment »
Posted by Rob Honeycombe on 27 March 2008
A Yeronga home overlooking the Brisbane River is set to become the first house in Brisbane auctioned exclusively online. A new service to Australian home-sellers, www.2bid2.com doesn’t simply broadcast the action from an onsite auction, but is a fully online bidding process. The USA’s had the innovative www.realtybid.com since 2001, and with that site having now hosted more than 38,000 auctions it’s our turn to give the real estate industry a digital kick-along.
www.2bid2.com is the brainchild of former Real Estate Institute president Michael Davoren and with easy comparisons to E-Bay he says the site puts consumers in the driving seat of both the buying and selling process. “The industry has progressed a long way over the last decade both technologically and professionally but the elongated strength of the market could have masked a change in consumer’s needs. Over 80% of real estate buyers are now from the X and Y generations and they prefer to communicate and to act differently to the Boomers and beyond.”
The auction of the home at Yeronga’s Brisbane Corso is expected to fetch in excess of $1.5 million. Bees Nees decided to trial the new auction approach for the increased anonymity it gives buyers. Many of our early enquiries for the home have been from wealthy locals who don’t necessarily want to stand on the front lawn and bid under the public eye.
Bidders still need to register and in many respects the auction is much like an onsite event. Sellers can expect a competitive environment amongst buyers – anyone who’s bought on E-Bay will know there’s plenty of pressure with an online auction! Unlike E-Bay though you can’t be outbid in the final minute as closing time on a www.2bid2.com auction is extended by another 5 minutes each time a bid is made.
Bidding for the Yeronga home is now open and while the auction’s slated to close on April 8th a 48 hour clock will start ticking down when bidding reaches the reserve price. Buyers get an SMS and email when another bid is placed and of course they can place their own bid from wherever they have web access.
If you’d like to know more about the online auction read our bidding guide and view the full listing info.
And tell us what you think about the new auction system – is it the way of the future or just a speed bump on the digital highway?!
Tags: auctions Brisbane, Brisbane River, technology, USA, www.2bid2.com, Yeronga Brisbane
Posted in real estate marketing, trends in Brisbane property | No Comments »
Posted by Rob Honeycombe on 16 August 2007
Imagine you’re out house hunting and want to know about everything that’s for sale nearby. Simply turn on your GPS enabled mobile phone and every listing in that neighbourhood is displayed in detail – and it changes as you move. Already underway through one major real estate portal in the USA this is just one of the new ‘toys’ buyers and sellers have to look forward to here in the next couple of years.
We’ve just come back from a conference where new technologies were revealed and with the internet now reaching more than 70% of Australians there’s masses of property info that’ll soon be on tap. Have a sticky-beak at www.trulia.com, another leading American site where someone moving cities can really get to know their new neighbourhood before they choose where to buy. Stats on household income, local schools, work travel times (more than 10% of Los Angeles residents take over an hour!) and the all-American favourite – crime rates are all dished up alongside listing info.
“Trulia Trends” shows you at a glance what suburbs in the USA have had the biggest gains and losses in median list prices and of course you can dream about the dearest neighbourhood – in Los Angeles that’s Beverly Hills right now with an average home at US$4.6m! Their “Heat Maps” show satellite maps of cities with the pricing data coloured across each suburb.
Americans thinking of selling can try www.zillow.com for an instant “Zestimate”, a computer generated estimate of the likely selling price of a home, based on data held for 70 million US properties. If you’re half serious about selling and would move at a magic price you can add it to the “Make Me Move” section. An interested buyer might just knock on your door with their pot of gold in hand. Just think – you won’t even need to speak to a real estate agent!
Tags: Brisbane home prices, technology, USA
Posted in real estate marketing, trends in Brisbane property | 2 Comments »
Posted by Rob Honeycombe on 21 March 2007
If it’s true that information is power, today’s buyers and tenants are becoming a force to be reckoned with! Traditionally the pricing of real estate, both for sale and for rent, was the domain of agents. We had the experience at the coalface, seeing through hundreds of homes each year, and recording their sale prices and rents. Over the past 14 years we’ve had subscriber only access to full government data on sales and ownership, so agents could advise sellers and buyers from a relative position of power and authority.
Now that great ‘information equaliser’ the internet has opened up records access to everyone for a handful of dollars. Less than $60 gets you last sale details on anyone’s home along with suburb medians, recent area trends and a bunch of comparable sales. Driving past a Brisbane home that’s for sale? An Australian SMS service will tell you what the current owners paid and when. It takes a couple of seconds and costs $5.95.
The USA web giant Zillow.com offers “Zestimates”, a dollar amount you could expect your home (or the one you’re negotiating to buy) to sell for, along with records on the number of bedrooms and bathrooms, and when the home was built. They claim to have data on 57 million homes, a price accuracy within 10%, and realtors in the States have been in uproar claiming the site’s fancy algorithm that predicts prices might do them out of a job!
What’s it all mean? Buyers have always shopped around to determine value: now they’re better informed than ever before and are telling the agents about recent sales. Collating and digesting prices from newspaper ads and signs wasn’t practical – but now buyers and tenants type in their home criteria on their choice of web portal, sort them in price order, and have instant market information.
So are we about to witness the extinction of real estate agents?! Some perhaps, especially those that relied on pricing and discounting for their results. For the rest of us we’ll get on with what we believe we’re really paid to do – focus on better marketing. Consumers understand value is more important than price, and eye-catching ads that genuinely entice them will continue to get results.
Tags: Brisbane home prices, Brisbane real estate agents, RP Data, technology, USA
Posted in Brisbane's sales market, real estate marketing, trends in Brisbane property | 1 Comment »
