
Since Google first began adding real estate listings to Google Maps in mid-2009, the world of online real estate has been monitoring the company’s every move. Each upgrade brought more speculation on how Google was planning to change things for property portals, real estate agents, and property hunters.
Now, we have a clearer idea of where Google is headed.

The team at Classified AdVentures (owners of Property Ad Guru) has been working hard on a new product called ListGlobally. This application allows agents to advertise their listings on market leading property portals around the world.
For example, an agent in the US or Australia can up load a listing and have it appear in the international section of such market leading sites as Rightmove in the UK, Enormo, Immobiliare in Italy, and Immobilienscout24 in Germany. Over the coming months ListGlobally will be adding more partners to its distribution list.
Not only is this a great way to promote your listings to an international audience, it is also a great tool to differentiate yourself from your competitors when marketing to potential sellers.
If you would like to be a guinea pig and help us test the application for free, just go to www.listglobally.com and click the link on the home page to register for a free trial. Once we receive your request, we will be in touch via email with your login details.

The news just over a week ago that Google was “entering” the UK/European market has sent the share prices of Rightmove and Seloger into a tailspin. Seloger dropped by 9% while Rightmove has plummeted a whopping 17%. Seloger has since recovered to its pre-news price while Rightmove continues to be significantly down.
So let’s look at what happened, will the property portal landscape change and is this impact on the share prices is justified.
An article by the Financial Times (Dec 2 titled “Google set to enter UK property market”) seems to have set the cat amongst the pigeons. The article stated that Google is in talks with British estate agents and that “experts” say that an entry by them to the market could pose a serious threat to existing property websites. The article didn’t talk about what Google was going to do and Google didn’t comment. So there is really not much to go on. So the only guide we really have as to what Google may do in the UK and Europe is what they have done in Australia.

open2view.com, a real estate website that covers New Zealand, Australia, Canada and the US, has been caught out doctoring the weather in its listing photos.

Over the past months the New Zealand market has seen some significant action in the property portal market.

This week the Google Street View function went live in New Zealand and property portals were very quick to start using it. It will allow house hunters to see a street by street view of the whole country.

With the exit of allrealestate.co.nz from the New Zealand market and the redirection of their traffic to realestate.co.nz, what does this mean for New Zealand real estate agents?