A New Way To Search For Real Estate (MyRealEstate.com.au)

[youtube id="wsrgNb4IU50" align="left" mode="lazyload" maxwidth="500"] There is a new, faster, better way to search for real estate online. A better experience with less ads. Hey, guys, Ryan here from onproperty.com.au, helping you find positive cash flow property. Today, I've got an awesome tool for you guys and an interview with the creator of that tool. The tool is myrealestate.com.au and the creator who's with me today is Nino Svonjia. Ryan: Hey, Nino, how's it going? Nino: Hi, Ryan. Good, yourself? Ryan: Very good. Now, you guys know when you go on to realestate.com.au or you go on to domain.com.au and you search for a property, the search listings aren't always the best. They're not organized the best. There's often those sponsored listings that get in the way that aren't in the same suburb or the same price range that you're searching for. Searching for properties online and finding a decent property can be extremely difficult and Nino is trying solve this problem with his tool, which I just discovered the other day, called myrealestate.com.au, which you guys can be able to check out. So, Nino, talk us through what is myrealesate.com.au and what are you guys trying to achieve over there? Nino: Thanks, Ryan, First of all, thanks for having me on your show. It's great to be here. MyRealEstate is a completely new kind of search engine for all listed properties in Australia. So, it's very unique, it's very different than anything that's out there. What we're trying to do is gather all of the listings that are advertised out there and put them together in one place. More like a traditional search engine rather than a property advertising portal. So, we want it to be fair. We want it to be fast and easy to use. Ryan: Yup. Nino: You mentioned some of those points there around fairness. We see a lot of that as we gather some of that data. Sometimes, prices can be put in a price range where they don't belong to, just so they're trying to attract more users to click on them, and this is really not fair for the buyers. Ryan: Often times, I'll do a search and stuff will come up that's listed as "auction" or it's listed as "no price" and it's not actually really in that price range. I can tell just by looking at the property. This property shouldn't really be shown to me in the price range I'm looking for. Nino: That's right. The reason for this is because some of these websites have the ability to specify a hidden price or a hidden price range so that they can still appear in search results. This is not fair because this is a little bit deceptive behavior and often, what advertisers do is put lower price ranges because they're trying to attract more buyers. With myrealestate.com.au, we just have a single price. You either have it said or you don't. And, we try and be very transparent about showing that to the users. In fact, if the price is not said, we try and penalize that and push it down because we think that if an advertiser hasn't put a price, usually, they try to involve in some tricky behavior. Otherwise, it's either too expensive, the vendor wants too much money or they're trying to fish the market, or something like that. Ryan: Okay. So, let's talk through the search software because I've had a little play with it, but not a massive play with it. I like some of the tools because you can search using keywords. So, I can search for things like "yield" and properties where the real estate agent has "rented", the yield will come up. Or, I can search words like "rented for" and then properties where the real estate agent has said "rented for" will come up. So, it can help us find out the yields of properties or find out the yields of areas, which is really helpful for people searching for positive cash flow. Is that how you designed it – to be like a search engine based on what the real estate agents say or is there some other way that we should be using it? Nino: No. That's exactly right. The idea is to make it more closer to like a traditional search engine, like Google. Based on research that we've done, a majority of users prefer using a keyword search box. They like the freedom and sometimes it's just very fast to just type in what you want. What I see with these other portals that are out there is that they're, if anything, even hiding these keyword input box and just making it quite complicated to go through all of these filters and click on things and find out where they are and they force you to go through this workflow by putting in a suburb first and so forth. So, we're changing that by making a very, very smart, we're bringing in cutting edge technology that can recognize the keywords that you are putting in and it goes even beyond Google because if you put in numbers and if you put in prices and if you put in distances, it will understand that and will automatically populate the criteria for you. So it saves you a lot of time. Ryan: Yeah. I really like this. Because, say I go to realestate.com.au and I've got to choose the suburb or I've got to put in multiple suburbs if I want to look at an area. I've got to put in the price range and I've also got to specify, am I look for a house? Am I looking for a townhouse? It is quite cumbersome to use. I'm looking at your website now. Some examples of searches you can do is like; "a house in Werribee VIC around the 300K price range". So it's actually going to understand this and do a radius or something and give us all properties around that area around the 300K? Nino: That's correct. We've tried to put in some default search type of queries that would be useful. like doing a radius around the location by putting in just the price, putting in just the attributes, like if you type in a "3-bedroom house", maybe you don't know where you can afford one. So it can be very, very powerful if you're just browsing the whole market. For example, in Victoria or New South Wales and so forth. I encourage your users and listeners to just jump on and try it out. You know, type in "500K" and see where you can buy a property for 500K. Ryan: Alright. I'm going to type this in now. 500K. Okay, so it's showing me all properties that are exactly $500,000. Nino: It won't be exactly $500,000. What you'll notice is that the filter has already been set for you. Usually, when I user types in "500K", they don't mean exactly 500K. They mean they want roughly 500K. So, what we do is we put a bit of – Ryan: Okay, so the filter's done. 425 to 575, so 75K either side. Nino: Right. Yes. It's doing a bit of a percentage on either side just to give you a bit of a bigger range because some people might put "499". Some people might put "520", but you probably want to consider all of those properties. Ryan: Yup. Okay. This is really cool. I like this. Do you think this will be, like, I'm just wondering how users are going to use this. Is it pulling data from realestate.com.au and domain.com.au? Should we skip using them altogether and try myrealestate.com.au? Or is it meant to be used in supplement for more specific keyword searches, like I was talking about with the yield? Nino: So, if you ask me, definitely, users should use this instead. Most of the people we researched, they visit more than one property website when they're looking for properties and this is a waste of time. You have to learn every website separately, they're both different. So that's exactly what we're trying to do. We gather all these listings from all of the websites. We haven't added them all yet, we're still in the process of adding them. We're still in beta, but the idea is to give you a whole, all inclusive market view. We point you back to the real estate site, so you're not going to miss out on anything. When you click on the listing and you want to view all the extended information, you do go back to RealEstate or Domain. It's basically and index. All in one place. A fair, easy and fast, much faster. I encourage your users also to have a look at the speed of it. We've done a lot of work to try and make it really fast to find things. Ryan: Yeah. I just did a search. I searched "units in Cronulla for 700K", which is a suburb in Southeast Sydney. Yeah, it was lightning fast and we got a lot of properties come up here. I can see the first one is listed or it says "found on Domain" and if I go ahead and click on that, then it brings up the Domain listing. Then I can see all the details and the map and all the different pictures and everything like that. So, really, I guess I would say, you guys are the Google of real estate listings. Is that correct? Nino: I think that would be a fair way of putting it, yes. Ryan: Yeah. Okay. So let's talk about some use cases and some cool ways that people can use your service. Obviously, we've talked about it's a more natural search engine. So, you can type in things as you think of them. You don't have to go through the filters. You can just type in, like I did, "units in Cronulla for 500K". Are there any other use cases apart from what we've already mentioned? That and being able to find specific keywords, like "yield" that we can recommend people try that are going to be useful? Nino: Yeah. So, I particularly really, really like the voice search feature. This is something amazing and we're very proud of that. This is Australian first, probably. And it's getting up there with cutting edge technology around the world. Our phones and our technology is rapidly improving, you know. Yourself, everybody these days has a phone or a tablet and we call them smart phones. Well, it's about time that our websites and our applications also became smart. This is what we're trying to do. If users have a phone or a tablet with the voice capable, so they can do the voice dictation. Ryan: Yeah. So, I've got an iPhone 6, so I've got Siri. Nino: Yup. So it's not on Siri.