April 1st saw our new site go live - with our TV Show front and centre, along with blogs, ABC news headlines, a totally revamped Client Zone, myaussiehome, and world first features like property heat maps and 'plot your home open route on a map'.

There are also other new features which you can take advantage of:

- Business search: flag a property as a business and it appears in this search

- Investments: tick the 'investment' box for a property to have it appear in this area

- Pets (Yes/No/Maybe) is now a filter search for rentals

Traffic to the new site was over 376,000 visitors in its first month, with over 12,000 views of the latest TV show

Last month aussiehome.com MD Charlie Gunningham wrote a post on the Australian real estate technology blog 'Business2' called "The Billion Dollar Black Hole".

Is A$1bn collectively 'wasted' in print media by Australian real estate agents? With total spending of $1.5bn as a group, real estate agents spend more than the auto industry, supermarkets and banks (and these guys are big advertisers).

However, with 55% (recent Macq Bank survey) of property enquiries coming from online ads, then shouldn't half of the spending be online? Real estate agents we meet claim 70-80% of enquiry comes from online ads, so maybe even more than half should be spent online.

In fact, $240mn is spent on online ads in Australia by real estate agents (16% of the total spend). This means $1.25mn is spent on print ads.

One could argue an equal split ($250mn each?) on print/online - but this leaves $1bn 'wasted' in print ads. True or not? You can have your views on the blog post, or email us directly.

We'd argue you do not have to spend more online, just LESS OFFLINE. As sellers, buyers, landlords and renters are ALL LOOKING online, and go online for information first and foremost. No question.

We've been talking about the rise of the mobile phone, and how mobile web real estate surfing will be the trend of 2010.

The iPhone is leading this trend. Of our 376,000 visitors to the site last month, 3% was from the iPhone alone. Last month it was 1.5%. A few months ago, it did not register. Over 2000 visitors a week are now accessing the site from an iPhone.

The iPhone allows you to seamlessly synch your calendar with Outlook, download music and play it (it has an iPod within it), surf the web, check and run your emails, and of course download the most amazing wide array of "apps" that come from the 'App Store'. All from one click of a menu item. 

There are only a handful of Australian real estate 'apps' in the iPhone App Store - you can bet there'll be over a hundred in a year's time. We are planning to have 20 of them - interested? Apps are going to be one of the KEY WAYS you will differentiate your brand from your competitors and have your clients 'touch' your brand (once they download yours, clients are unlikely to download another) - but an iPhone App is more than another version of your web site.

iPhones know where you are, because they are GPS enabled - mapping, location, it's all there. So the better apps will show all the home opens in proximity to a user, plot the route around home opens, nearby listings in different price ranges, and have the ability to connect to facebook and twitter... not just be another way of searching for sale/rent.

It's a fantastic new world, and the old print media will be more and more irrelevant over time (spend money on your iPhone app, not on that full page print ad - prospective clients will be more impressed that way).

One could make a strong argument for the fact that ANY business (not just real estate businesses) should use Facebook Business Pages much like they might their own web site - except that in Facebook's case, there are FAR MORE potential visitors on that platform already - so possibly they are even more important?

600,000 people in Perth/WA have Facebook accounts, and HALF of them go on every week - many everyday. With the ablity to brand, differentiate and communicate with this captive audience, why would that not be an enticing idea?

Blogs, videos, photo galleries, event management... it's all there, for free, inside a Facebook business page. And now, you can create a LANDING PAGE, for non members of your page to see before they join. We have done one for aussiehome.com - go to www.facebook.com/aussiehome without logging into Facebook (or click the WELCOME tab on our pages).

We can design and build one of these for you easily - prices range from $200 entry level (once off) to $600, depending on their complexity. And we're having a HALF OPENING PRICE sale of this product for the next 2 weeks.

$100 for a landing page - too easy. CONTACT US to get yours done today.