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The Australian property landscape has changed dramatically in recent history, and much of that is driven by a shift in how consumers are searching for properties to meet their needs.
View Media Group (VMG), and its listings portal, view.com.au, have recognised that for how far we’ve come, the landscape is continuing to shift. That’s why VMG has diversified how it helps agents reach interested buyers, and harnessed the power of performance marketing.
REB’s Juliet Helmke recently spoke with Trent Casson, managing director of residential at View Media Group, to discuss how the company is shaking up the property marketing landscape.
Here’s how the conversation went.
Juliet Helmke: In quite recent history, things were quite different in terms of how we listed and marketed properties.
Trent Casson: They certainly were. The old print magazines in the past were just a wonderful listing tool for agents. And one of the areas that we're really focused on here at View Media Group is: How do we recreate all those ancillary benefits that used to flow off the back of vendor paid advertising? That is, how do you leverage vendor paid advertising to help you find your next listing?
Print is now a very rare commodity, or something that only very few still have on their marketing schedules and there are only very few options out there because it's a very expensive medium to produce. We look at how we can create environments for our customers right along the path to purchase that allow agents to unlock a lot of those benefits that they perhaps got in the old print dominated world.
That's not something that is easily done or that many are actually concentrating on. It's more just a direct outcome for the spend. But at View Media Group, we have portals and we have off-portal platforms, we have an AI business and they're all entered all around the question of, how do we create opportunities to grow, nurture new listing environments for agents off the back of not just vendor paid advertising, but subscriptions and making sure that agents are investing in areas that can push their business forward?
JH: Tell me about how you came to be a part of View Media Group, and The Today Business, which you founded.
TC: The Today Business was formed by Simon Kent, Travis Day, Antony Catalano and myself. We all left Domain probably within 12 months of each other, post [ASX] float. We were looking for our next challenge and we decided to build a media agency that specialised in property.
If you kind of go back to 2018, it was very much a set-and-forget environment. Large developers, large project marketers, what they were getting from their agencies at the time was quite set and forget. They put you on portals and the back of a newspaper and hoped that that would get you a result. So we really went after that developer category as the core for The Today Business.
We founded The Today Business on the premise that we thought there was a better way [to market], particularly if we could bring in the sophistication of these large media agencies who are dealing with Colgate and Ford and all these big companies – how they thought about customer acquisition and data acquisition and segmentation. All these things were pretty foreign to our customers at the time.
So we had to take a lot of these developers on a journey. And I'm really pleased to say we were backed by some wonderful partners at the start that we built up relationships with and I would say that 99 per cent of those customers or partners are still with us today.
We have been able to add so much value by having people in our business that came out of a different lens. Simon Kent, Antony Catalano and myself had a lot of history in property and so we're able to get our guys up to speed pretty quickly on that side of things. But we looked at what a diversity of thinking could bring to this segment.
After that, we then built out a residential division or a residential platform, which is a thriving part of our business today at VMG. And that platform is called Acquire. So that was built by The Today Business, which has now been rebranded to Today Media.
Acquire really aimed to take all the learnings from the teams of media professionals that we had optimising campaigns all day, every day for our big developers and project marketers, and trying to put that in the hands of real estate agents so they could offer that sort of digital marketing smart to a mum and dad vendor who are selling the biggest asset of their life – who would otherwise be given, you know, a media schedule that was pretty cookie cutter.
So how do we do that? With Acquire, we give vendors and agents that sort of sophistication at the push of a button. It now has dozens and dozens of major networks now around the country that use it.
But Acquire is not a household name, for one reason. That’s because it's a white label product. So we have some of the biggest brands around the country using it, but they use it under their guise. And that's a really important thing because all the benefits that flow through that platform all drive back to the agent and their website. So the agent owns the leads, the agent owns the customer, the agent owns the data and we're setting the agent up for a future of success.
It's essentially a first party data strategy that is funded by vendors. Vendors still get the benefit of the campaign. And the campaign could be social media, it could be digital channels, it could be video channels – we have a whole bunch of channels that come together to create what is essentially a vendor paid advertising package. And that drives lots of incremental audiences to a listing, but the listing that’s on the agent’s site, not on the portals. So it's a very complementary strategy to the portals, but with all the ancillary benefits being pushed back to the agent to help them really map a path to independence from the portals.
JH: That is huge for agents – to be able to offer that tailored service that makes people feel like they're being not only taken care of, but that they have agency in this process. And it’s so interesting to hear how you went about identifying that need for something to flow back to the agencies.
TC: At the time, the whole notion of performance media, you know, was quite new. There were some agents doing it okay, but really it was just social media. And social media was adopted really well by the industry quickly because it was easy to execute and you could see an immediate benefit.
But you know, there's social media and there's social media and we play in the paid space. Performance media underpins everything we do in our business. We've really had to do a lot of heavy lifting to take the industry on this journey. We bring that expertise, we push that IP into their business and we make it just simple to execute and to articulate to a vendor. That's the important piece because we don't want our agents having to get caught in in-depth digital media conversations in the lounge room. They should be able to convey the “so what” to a vendor very, very easily and then get on with the rest of the listing presentation. We don't want to take up anything more than, you know, 20 seconds in that conversation.
But you do have to articulate a smart digital strategy, particularly to the digital native generation. That involves a combination of portals, absolutely. Portals do a great job in finding active buyers that will inquire on your property. But there is so much more out there. I think the latest stat was something around 30 per cent of those that intend to buy property in the next 12 months are not actively looking on portals. But we are absolutely online all the time. So we try to bring that complimentary on-portal and off-portal strategy. Some like to call it a real active and passive strategy. But one of them absolutely drives all the benefits back to the agent off the back of all the VPA that they derive.
And if you think about the old way of thinking, we believe that performance media right now is to the portals what the portals were to print. So it's a really interesting time for this industry moving forward. And those that can adopt performance marketing and execute it as a core part of their strategy will not only sell homes quicker because they will find an incremental audience that sits outside the portals and they'll drive more people to their open for inspections, but more people to your open inspections is more people that you can talk to about selling their property. So it drives business forward.
JH: We are really talking about the new frontier here in many ways. Tell me, what was it like integrating Today Media into View Media Group?
TC: It was always the plan. When we started The Today Business back in about 2018, a number of key execs that had left Domain post-float were looking for their next opportunities. Not just ex-Domain staff of course, but for example Jordy Catalano and Tom Hywood. They went and started a company called apartmentdevelopments.com au, which was essentially only for off the plan. So at the same time we were building out Today Media, there were a bunch of like-minded individuals who all had existing relationships that were building other proptech related businesses. And we all had a view that down the track we would come together under an umbrella at some point.
Once we got into a level of scale that allowed for those acquisitions to happen, then those conversations started to take place. But we were in no doubt that that was kind of the path that we were heading on. The main thing was to build a strong independent business in case that didn't happen or didn't eventuate or it wasn't the right move for us when you get three, four, five years down the track.
What's really important to know for those that are thinking about doing similar things or are going down a similar path, is that the six or seven businesses that have vended up into View Media Group, ourselves included, have taken the vast majority of the proceeds from that sale in scrip.
We wanted to make sure that we were absolutely aligned to the outcomes of the broader VMG group of companies, and doubling down on going on this ride that is essentially another startup full of brands who have great businesses in their own right.
JH: It sounds like it's a place that really supports your ambitions to innovate. How do you go about ideating or discovering areas that do require that disruption? How do you identify what deserves your time and attention?
TC: It’s something that you have to work incredibly, incredibly hard at. You have to find balance, particularly in a business that has six or seven existing established businesses within it that all have their own KPIs and all have their own execs, So when we all come together, there obviously needs to be a recalibration of what are we trying to achieve together and balance that with the day to day needs and requirements of your teams and of your individual businesses.
But we always saw the synergies of what we could do if we brought these businesses and the talent around them together. When we started thinking about how we could not only stitch together our products, we realised we could also address or create marketplaces that perhaps haven't been concentrated on in the past to the level that they could have been, simply because maybe the incumbents were chasing a different pot of money.
Probably the first thing that comes into mind is the launch of view.com.au. Whilst on the outset some might go, why do we need another portal? We've gone about things very, very differently in that it's free to list on our portal. So we have the vast majority of all listings around the country listing on our website without paying. Right now, any mum and dad can list on our site and sell their home for free. And that in itself is an enormous shift. Now there are bells and whistles, obviously, as with any product that you can dive into from a paid perspective. And I think that creates an interesting market dynamic moving forward as prices are increasing to the point of almost no return and we are building a strong product from underneath where it's free to list.
JH: It seems that relationships are really key in innovating, for you. Perhaps in real estate we don’t talk about that enough.
TC: We would like to think that there is no way that our model works unless all of our partners benefit. You know, we have a long history of partnering with the industry.When we formed Metro Media Publishing, they called that the last great print deal. But we like to think about that as the first great agent equity deal where we really spent significant amounts of time and energy getting agents to understand the power that was in their hands if they just coordinated and understood how they could work together, how they could bring change to the industry because of the vast amounts of marketing dollars that they represent as a group.
I remember, at the start, sitting at a Melbourne hotel with about 15 or 16 Victorian based CEOs in a room and telling them, “your businesses are media agencies that happen to sell houses”. They were going, “this guy's crazy. What is he talking about?”
We said, well, a media agency takes a brief from a client, you put a media strategy together and you present that media strategy to your client, they sign off on it, you activate the media on their behalf and you drive a result. That is exactly what you're doing with your vendor paid advertising schedules, but you sell houses as your core business.
So those relationships were formed really strongly, really early, by giving them an understanding and a path to activating that knowledge and bringing that to life to drive value beyond just the standard real estate commission into their businesses.
JH: What are you excited about going into 2025?
TC: 2025 is going to be just an incredible year for us. We've been building synergies within the business. We really only came together about two years ago, and since then, we've been building out a lot of the frameworks for our offerings. That is the financial services model for agents, but the other main part then is building out the financial services model that hangs off the back of view.com.au for direct-to-consumer. And that's certainly the biggest pot that is out there and something that we're working incredibly hard with with our great partner ANZ to bring to life.
Some of the integrations that we are working on with the ANZ Plus app include bringing view.com to life within the ANZ app environment, like searching for a property based on your serviceability of a loan.
What's in the pipeline – without giving too much away – is incredibly exciting for not only the end-user experience for where portals can and should go, but for unlocking the value in all those major revenue pots for our business and for our shareholders. So we have some test cases for partners where they are using all of our products as one, because everything talks to each other and works together. And I look forward to being able to take those results to market next year.
And then we’ll be working at an enterprise level to unlock the value that perhaps some of the networks out there at the moment don't truly understand how to unlock. If we can help them do that, then they benefit, we benefit. And our partners and investors certainly benefit. So bringing those to life next year is probably the most exciting part of our roadmap for 2025.
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Editor’s note: This conversation has been edited and abridged from the original transcript for clarity.
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