Comments on RealEstate.com.au

Recently, Ben and I have been looking for a new place to move into, and I've been primarily using RealEstate.com.au (REA) to find places to look at. (Disclaimer: I own shares in RealEstate.com.au, but am not affiliated with it in any way…) While it has certainly made house-hunting easier (MUCH easier), I still find myself spending more time doing mundane tasks, rather than actually looking at houses. So… I think there are a couple of areas where the site could be improved (which I will forward onto REA).

First, some good points:

• Most properties have at least one photo, which is great when skimming through places. I find I don't pay too much attention to the properties without them.
• At the bottom of most property pages, there's a WhereIs map showing the location of the property. Occasionally this isn't accurate, but it's helpful anyway. (Domain.com.au shows maps as well, but places a big icon where the property is located and provides a "suburb view". Nice.)

Search Interface

The interface for entering search criteria is fairly easy to use (at least easier than JustListed.com.au). However, Domain.com.au seems to have a much cleaner interface:

From the one search area, you can choose to search for places to buy, rent or share. It also doesn't bombard you with checkboxes and popup boxes, which is nice.

Compare this to the RealEstate.com.au search page, which requires you to select whether you're looking for a place to buy, rent or share first, then a state:

What could REA do to fix this? Streamline the interface a bit more. The searching interface is a bit busy, and can be quite confusing.

Saved Searches

The REA site allows you to create your own account, in which you can save listings that you like, or a search. Note the singular "a". The concept of the saved search is great, as I will normally search for rental properties in the same suburbs, in the same price range. However, there is no functionality to edit that search.

Additionally, if you save another search, it replaces the existing one. Ergh.

Search Results

A feature I would like to see added is a search results RSS/Atom feed. Instead of having to go to the REA site to check out the latest properties, let them come to me. It would save me heaps of time by being able to just skim the items in a news feed, rather than hunting through pages and pages of results and figuring out which properties have been recently added! (This would probably have to be tied into "Saved Searches".)

Inspection Times

One great feature on the REA site is being able to view the inspection times for properties. Additionally, you can search only for properties that have available inspection times listed. Nice.

However, I've found that not enough of the agents handling the properties publish the Saturday inspection times (which is really the only time Ben and I have to look at places), which means I spend a considerable amount of time on Fridays ringing up agents and asking for inspection times. Ergh. If the functionality is there, why not use it? Maybe REA needs to give the agents a bit of a prod to encourage them to use this, I don't know. The real estate agents probably don't enjoy fielding calls all day Friday asking about inspection times, so it would help them to put the times up on the web.

Similar to the idea of an RSS/Atom feed for saved searches, it would be nice to be able to see what properties have published inspection times as a news feed. This would probably be available if "saved searches" had feeds, though.

The icing on the cake for this would be calendar integration. I don't expect REA to setup a calendaring service, but if I could select a number of properties that have listed their inspection times, check a box to say that I'm going to visit it, a calendar could be generated that the user could subscribe to. Alternatively, automatically generating a calendar with all of the inspection times returned from a saved search would work, too. I could then subscribe to that calendar in iCal (or Sunbird or Outlook), planning which properties to look at on a Saturday would be SO much easier. Once I'm subscribed, it's as easy as syncing the computer with my phone (or iPod), and I have the inspection times with me wherever I go.

Other issues

One issue I've found is that when a property is taken off the market, it just disappears from the search results (obviously), but also from the "saved list". It would be nice to leave the property information page around, but slap a 'sticker' on it saying that it has been leased/sold/whatever.

Some caveats

Since I've harped on a lot about adding RSS/Atom feeds to the site, this would potentially take some traffic away from the site, as users would view the search and property pages less (which means less exposure to ads). To combat this, the site could place some small, unobtrusive ads (ala Google AdWords) into the feeds.

Conclusion

After looking at Domain tonight, in some areas the interface is a bit better than REA. However, REA has something like 70% of all residential real estate agents in Australia signed up with it, which is HUGE. I've therefore got a wider selection of properties to choose from when searching at REA. (That's not to say I won't use Domain as well, though.)

So basically, I'd like feeds (Atom/RSS) to be added to the REA site, as well as subscribe-able calendars, and perhaps a slightly cleaner interface. Start advertising and let the users know how to take advantage of these features, and it'll be huge. (Mark my words!)