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The vertical market of real estate has a lot of room for growth in Australia, especially with respect to the online community. NPD Research recently completed a study that found that 64% of Americans who are looking for real estate have used the Internet, with 88% of those searching for residential properties.
Real estate is an excellent candidate for web-based research since the process of buying real estate is so time-consuming, large volumes of accurate and detailed information are imperative, and so much paperwork is involved.
Real estate developers in Australia currently rely on traditional models of advertising, which relies on page impression capacity, and publishing prices.
The two largest groups on the Australian real estate scene are www.realestate.com.au and www.property.com.au. Each of these has launched large-scale advertising campaigns in a number of non-internet media in an effort to increase their share of the online market.
With regards to home buying, there are around 8,570 realtors, more and more of whom are opting to complement their conventional advertising with Internet advertising. They most often do this by distributing their listings to the online community. At the present time, it costs real estate agents a set amount of $150 per month for unrestricted listings on Realestate.com.au. The agents then charge their clients a set amount for listing their property online.
Predictions for the real estate market says that the business model will become more centered on transactions as developers begin to be competitive in high-paying areas like mortgage origination. Currently in Australia, the aggregate of mortgages is over $230 billion (RBA), and is growing as more people start mortgages online. In June of 1997, Meyers Internet Services predicted that the mortgage originations of US Net made up almost 1$ of the total $4 billion in 1997. This proportion was expected to grow by twelve times by 2001.
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