Agent Update Blog

At The Forum inaugural event, Australian Estate Agency boss and best-selling author John McGrath revealed the secrets from down under which have put his business on top.

Speaking at Smithfield London in early January, McGrath’s extraordinary presentation treated over 100 delegates to his story of building a business from rock bottom to a network of eight offices with sales of over $2 billion.

McGrath recalled being at school with Russell Crowe. The two of them were bottom of the class, constantly in trouble and remain close friends to this day. Indeed, years later McGrath would break the Australian record for a real estate purchase when selling Crowe an apartment overlooking Sydney Harbour.

Continue reading "John McGrath - the Estate Agency wizard from Australia" »

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Continue reading "Letter to the Editor of Estate Agency News" »

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realestate.com.au Ltd (ASX:REA, and its subsidiary companies, The REA Group) has partnered with SKY Italia, the Italian pay TV operator to acquire 90% of Casa.it for 9.6m Euro. Following the transaction, realestate.com.au will own 59.4%, SKY Italia will own 30.6% and Casa.it's founder and current CEO will retain 10%.

Founded in 1996, Casa.it has become Italy's largest property site with over 2,800 estate agent offices subscribing to the service and advertising 130,000 homes for sale or for rent. Each month there are around 700,000 unique visitors to the site. Casa.it has operations in Treviso Northern Italy and call centre operations in Bucharest Romania.

"Casa.it is a great acquisition for our business," said Simon Baker, Managing Director of The REA Group. "While currently a small business, Casa.it is profitable and the market leader in a country with 60 million people, around 20,000 estate agent offices, high rates of home ownership, and strong broadband penetration. We believe that Italy is an emerging country for online real estate advertising and Casa.it is best placed to capture much of the growth in the market."

Baker plans to rapidly grow Casa.it's business. "We are pleased to be able to partner with SKY Italia. Casa.it will benefit from accessing the broad coverage of SKY Italia and the online real estate experience of The REA Group" he explained.

Tom Mockridge, CEO of SKY Italia, commented, "We are pleased to partner with realestate.com.au to acquire Casa.it. The acquisition adds another dimension to SkyItalia's business and we plan to work closely with Casa.it to gain greater awareness of our pay television services and potentially develop another channel to market."

Casa.it will become part of The REA Group, and its founder will remain as CEO of Casa.it and report to Simon Baker.

"The acquisition of Casa.it further expands The REA Group. We now have operations in Australia, the United Kingdom, New Zealand and Italy. Together there are 14,800 agents advertising around 900,000 listings to 5.5 million unique visitors," commented Baker.

The transaction is subject to approval by the Italian Antitrust Authority and it is expected that the transaction will be completed in early to mid December 2006.

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Janet Edwards, a negotiator at the Stretford branch in Manchester for Reeds Rains was the lucky winner of propertyfinder.com's national Red Letter Day competition.

Janet will be jetting off with a friend to Sydney courtesy of propertyfinder.com and Virgin Atlantic after winning the nationwide competition. She was chosen at random from more than 1,000 agents who entered the prize draw.

The tickets, which were presented to Janet by propertyfinder.com CEO Warren Bright last week in Manchester, will provide Janet with the perfect opportunity to swap the drizzly British winter for the golden beaches of Australia.

Warren Bright, chief executive of propertyfinder.com said: "It was great to see the winner come from the Manchester area as it is a very important area for us and an area in which we are experiencing rapid growth. Our investment in building propertyfinder.com's presence with TV adverts, radio, online competitions and propertyfinder.com branded buses is clearly now paying off for the hundreds of agents we have using propertyfinder.com in the region."

With two tickets to Australia already won, propertyfinder.com is set to continue showing it's appreciation to estate agents by giving them another chance to win a trip to Australia to watch England do battle with the Aussies at the final Ashes Test in Sydney. The trip includes seven nights at a 4 star harbour front hotel, New Years Eve in Sydney and tickets to the exclusive Members Area for all five days of the test match. To enter, agents simply have to make an appointment with a propertyfinder.com sales representative by calling on 08700 758888 before 23rd November 2006.

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Since being acquired 12 months ago, propertyfinder.com has continued its run as the UK's fastest growing major property portal and according to independent statistics recently became the second most popular property portal in the UK.

Continue reading "propertyfinder.com rockets ahead" »

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Continue reading "Property Classifieds Moving Online" »

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Between October last year and May this year, propertyfinder.com has out grown all major competitors. 

According to independent auditor comScore, propertyfinder.com grew by 88% over the May to October period, more than double the growth of fish4homes and rightmove.

Most interesting was the decline in traffic suffered by primelocation over the same period.  According to comScore, primelocation's traffic decreased by 2% between October 2005 and May 2006. 

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