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Recent press reports indicate thart the BBC is looking revamping their website and adopting many of the latest trends on the internet.
The Guardian reported on the 25th that the BBC would be rebuilding its site around user generated content including blogs and home videos.
Check out the full story at http://media.guardian.co.uk/site/story/0,,1760999,00.html
Last week, www.realestate.com.au, the 50% owner of www.propertyfinder.com, announced that it had finalised agreements to purchase the Australian commercial website www.propertylook.com.au for $9.05 million.
Property Look Pty Ltd operates www.propertylook.com.au, a commercial property website site. During March, propertylook.com.au had 60,601 visitors viewing 2,400 listings from 175 agents across Australia and New Zealand. The main advertisers include Australia’s four largest commercial agents – CB Richard Ellis, Colliers International, Jones Lang LaSalle and Knight Frank.
Over the next six months, www.propertylook.com.au will be merged with realcommercial.com.au, realestate.com.au Ltd’s commercial property website. realcommercial.com.au has been Australia’s largest commercial property website since launch in 2002 and during March this year attracted 142,131 visitors viewing 42,000 listings from over 600 commercial agents and business brokers.
The combination of the two commercial sites clearly positions realcommercial.com.au as the leader in online advertising of commercial property in Australia and provides an entry point into the New Zealand market. It is expected that traffic to the combined site will increase to around 180,000 unique visitors per month.
The combined site provides all visitors with a comprehensive view of the market. While other commercial real estate site focus on the small to medium commercial properties, www.realcommercial.com.au will provide the user with access to properties from the corner shop to large city buildings.
Over the next six months we will upgrade the existing www.realcommercial.com.au website to include the best features of propertylook.com.au and realcommercial.com.au. In the mean time, both sites will operate in parallel with clear linkages between them.
We believe that the combined operations will provide agents, their vendors, and their landlords with the most cost effective way to advertise to Australia’s largest and most qualified online commercial property audience. We are extremely pleased to have Australia’s four largest commercial real estate companies and all of the Property Look members as customers of realcommercial.com.au.
Have you ever had a weird flatmate?
63% of Australians and over 80% of the English have had a weird flatmate experience.
Online research findings
Recently we conducted surveys on both realestate.com.au & propertyfinder.com to uncover the truth about weird flatmates. The results were surprising, entertaining, and scary. You wouldn’t believe what some flatmates get up to! Since consumers were so engaged by the topic, we decided to launch an international viral campaign across our Australian, UK and NZ sites.
Viral campaign
Today we are launching the campaign with a video clip created specifically for the internet, which features a most unusual flatmate. This cutting edge, comical clip will have people laughing all the way around the globe and leave you wondering what your flatmates get up to when you’re not around. 
The ad will appear on a number of external sites, including myspace.com, zooweekly.com.au and lycos.co.uk (to maximize the viral uptake of the clip), as well as on key channels on ninemsn.com.au. We will also promote the clip on our own sites (www.realestate.com.au, www.propertyfinder.com, www.allrealestate.co.nz) and in newsletters.
To view the ad click here (http://www.weirdflatmate.com/blog)
weirdflatmate.com
To encourage consumer engagement with the video clip and our brands, we have sponsored a dedicated website - www.weirdflatmate.com. Flatmates around the world will be able to share their own flatmate stories via a blog on the site. In addition they can download the clip, review the survey findings in detail, read interesting flatmate stories, and respond to weekly polls. It’s fascinating reading!
THE topic of discussion in the UK property industry is HIPs - Home Information Packs.
So what is a HIP? From the 1st July 2007, a vendor or their agent will need to have a home information pack produced for their property before the property can be put on the market for sale. The HIP contains legal searches, title deeds, the terms of sale and an home condition report (HCR as it is known).
So why have HIP's been legislated and are being introduced from the 1st July next year? The benefits being proffered include the prevention of transactions collapsing, cutting of the time between offer and completion, and to provide better information.
However, while many are touting the value of a HIP, a number of questions have been raised as to whether the introduction of HIP's will truly be beneficial for the industry and whether they will even be launched at all.
In his article in The Sunday Times on the 2nd of April, Phil Spencer raised a number of issues and concludes that "forcing sellers to produce a HIP is actually detrimental. It will bury the property market in an avalanche of paperwork and will ultimately fail to improve the home-buying process."
The issues he raises include:
Check out his article at http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2098-2109937,00.html
This entry comes from somewhere over the Bay of Bengal on my way from London to Singapore. Singapore Airlines and Boeing have teamed to create Connexion - internet access at 30,000 feet for only US$29 per day.
So where is technology taking us and what opportunities does it open for the real estate industry? The best way to look at this is access, devices and usage.
Access
Almost everywhere you go you are now able to get internet access. At first we had the dial up telephone line. This was slow and hard going as you had to remember dial in numbers and access codes. Then along came broadband - either ADSL or cable - that gave us always on, instant access at much greater speeds. While the total number of households with internet connections is barely growing, they are migrating at great speed to broadband connections.
Now recently broadband has moved from a physical connection to a wireless connection and this has manifested itself in a number of ways.
There is wireless broadband in the home through wireless routers attached to an broadband connections. A wireless router is now only GBP150+ and you can wander your home free of wires. Dont forget to turn on the WEP security.
Wireless hotspots throughout cities as becoming common place. Cafes such as Starbucks have done deals with telco's that allow you to sit, enjoy a coffee and for a small fee wirelessly log on.
Often you can get access to a wireless connection in a city without going to a hotspot. In many cities, people with home wireless connections dont turn on security allowing others to borrow their bandwidth. Cities such as Paris, London, New York etc seem to have lots of these connections available. You just have to wander around and see what is available. Some major cities are in the throws of creating a city wide network of free hotspots.
There are city wide wireless connections through such services as iBurst. In Australia all you need is an iBurst card and you can have wireless connection across Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and the Gold Coast for as little as GBP30 / month.
Finally there is internet access via the traditional mobile phone services who offer GPRS connections or G3 connections and therefore fast (but not as fast as a direct broadband connection) access to the internet from a mobile device.
Any which way you cut it, access to the internet is become easier and easier.
Devices
The range of devices that connect to the internet is increasing every day. Initially we have the desktop PC with a modem card. This then grew to built in modems for notebooks and fnally with the advent of broadband connections - lan connections and a wireless modems became standard with all notebooks and PC's.
So what new devices are on the horizon that are allowing us to access the internet from almost all places.
Of course there is the notebook computer. The challenge here is that they are becoming smaller and smaller. I use a Sony Vaio VGN-T37GP. It has a 10.1 inch screen and weighs next to nothing - and the best bit is the 5 hr battery life. The next generation will be smaller again - ultra portable devices. These will be able to be held in your hand and will have the full functionality of a normal laptop computer. Microsoft is in the throws of launching Origami - an example of one of these devices. (See: www.origamiproject.com) The challenge will be usability or finding people with smaller enough fingers to use the devices.
Mobile phones and portable devices such as the O2 and the Treo (see: http://www.palm.com/us/) will become more commonplace. Today they are the first cross over devices from being a phone to a small computer. While their current functionality is relatively limited, this will increase over time as you see the convergence of the mobile phone with the notebook computer.
Another potential development may come from mp3 devices merging with mobile phones. Imagine an ipod from apple that is also a mobile phone. Many of the portable devices such as an O2 and Treo can already play mp3 files (although not fantastically well).
Household devices such as the fridge and TV will also become internet enabled over time. We have all seen the ads for the LG fridge with the internet screen on the front. However, what will be interesting is when your TV is truly IP enabled. One of the big trends we are likely to see is the delivery of IP video across the internet to your TV.
Finally, and more in the category of fun then practical, is internet enabled watches. Check out (http://www.10meters.com/timex.html)
Usage
Finally lets look at how the internet may be used in the future.
Today most of us use the internet to surf static websites. We look at images, read text and perhaps interact a little through a blog or a forum. However most of us dont venture too much beyond that. However, the future will have far great interactivity and more dynamic presentation.
Audio is making huge leaps forward on the internet. This is primarily being driven by podcasts (see: www.itunes.com). These are small, up to 30 minutes in length, audio shows that you can listen to on your computer or on your mp3 player - even your portable devices such at the O2 and Treo. It is the same as taking a radio station, slicing the programs into 30 min segments and then allowing people to list to the segments whenever they like.
Video will also be a dominant player on the intenet in the future. As the bandwidth increases and devices become more integrated into the normal living environment, internet delivered video will be common place. Today TV shows are freely available onto video ipods. While Australians wait for the next enthalling episode of Commander in Chief on Channel 7, Americans have been purchasing the individual episodes for months for only $1.99 for play on their computer or ipods - and there are no advertisements!! How long will it be before we are watching shows direct from the US via the internet?
Conclusion
The internet is not going away. In fact it is likely to become more and more pervasive. The challenge for the property industry will be to work out how to adapt the changes in access, devices and usage to provide the buyer, seller, and the agent with higher quality service.
