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Heavyweights in the Australian real estate listings space Domain and realestate.com.au are trading blows over market share, with Domain claiming they will soon overtake the market share of realestate.com.au.
Executives from realestate.com.au say they don’t believe the hype - the industry will choose for itself.
Domain chief operating officer Tony Blamey said Domain is seeing an influx of agents that has accelerated over the last couple of months. Mr Blamey said the lure has been a mixture of agents chasing a listings alternative and that they are voting with their feet.
Speaking exclusively to Real Estate Business, Mr Blamey said agents are exclusively listing on Domain, which recently achieved the milestone of three million downloads of their smartphone app.
This figure, according to Mr Blamey, has backed up a 70 per cent increase in users when compared to the same period last year, and is driven in part by a new homepage development, blog enhancements and agent profiles.
“We had the single biggest audience figure this week,” Mr Blamey said.
“We have recently rolled out our agent participation model in the South Australian market and on the back of that interest we are looking to expand nationally and partner with agents for that.
“We have reached a few milestones and are closing in on realestate.com.au.”
Tom Panos, general manager of real estate sales at News Corp, dismissed any concern rival Domain will take over the local market share of realestate.com.au. Mr Panos said based on anecdotal evidence currently in hand, realestate.com.au is clearly the leader in delivering buyer enquiries to agents through web portals.
Mr Panos said he appreciates that both Domain and realestate.com.au could create a narrative based on statistics, but there are so many numbers in the digital world that any portal could create a good story. He said he is regularly in front of 12,000 agents face to face annually at a time when delivering training and strategy events.
“Good estate agents make decisions based on evidence, not the claims a management team will make on a product, and I have to say in Australia the industry has become significantly better at being able to monitor and track where enquiry levels come from so they can make up their own minds on how to best spend vendors’ money,” Mr Panos said.
