In my humble opinion it’s already a forgone conclusion – Google will dominate the real estate listing market in Australia. It is only a matter of time. In this game Google has several advantages over its competitors:
– large user base (at least 50% larger than realestate.com.au and domain.com.au combined!)
– search engine to drive the traffic (free!)
– independent developer community to cover market niches (and further fragment the market)
– mobile market presence (and possibly soon the dominating position)
If realestate.com.au and domain.com.au have smart strategists and they act aggressively now, they can slow the pace of structural changes in the industry, but they cannot prevent them.
For full analysis and reasoning see my all-things-spatial.blogspot.com site:
https://all-things-spatial.blogspot.com/2009/07/google-threat-to-real-estate-listing.html
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