Posts Tagged ‘raywhite.com’

The Ray White Group has surpassed over 1.1 million views in one month of their properties on Trade Me.  Ray White is the first real estate company to surpass this mark, with average on 585 views per property. In addition to this, the Ray White Group also received over 6,500 emails enquiries on their properties during the month an average of over 300 per working day.

Ray White can attribute a high degree of its marketing success rate directly from Trade Me.  Our partnership  with Trade Me Property is developed on the basis that their real estate website receives in excess of 2.5 times the amount of any other composite website and 5 times the amount of any individual agency website.  Ray White has 100% of their stock with Trade Me and this provides Ray White vendors with a far greater exposure than any other individual real estate company in New Zealand.

Trade Me Property has a average visitor length of 21 minutes, with the highest from any individual agency being a mere 5 minutes.  This gives further emphasis to Ray White in regards to their properties exposure and the relevant display information. 

Complimentary to Trade Me Property is Ray White’s national site www.raywhite.co.nz.  This provides the user with integrated industry news together with 14,500 properties that all have satellite and hybrid mapping and fully featured photography which is enhanced by the slideshow display format.  The value of our national site is further enhanced through the 131 individual Ray White office sites which provide detailed information at a local level. 

Ray White has developed a complete web strategy which offers vendors and also purchasers the greatest audience of any New Zealand real estate company.  Each property that is listed through Ray White receives automatic listing on Trade Me Property, raywhite.com, raywhite.co.nz and the local office website.  This exposes Ray White properties to in excess of 1.125 million unique browsers per month, which is 6 times our nearest national competitor.

Trade me is recognised as the clear leader for online Real Estate marketing. Ray White is the number 1 Real Estate company on Trade Me.

Ray White Group Chairman Brian White has spent almost half a century at the coalface of the Australian property industry. He reflects on some of the changes affecting Australian real estate during the past 10 years – one of the most turbulent decades in history for Australian property.

The return of optimism to Australian property markets as this decade comes to a close brings a contrast to the same position 10 years earlier when all the talk was ‘how long will this property surge continue?’

Ten years ago the Sydney property market was more buoyant than it had been for a decade. The Sydney Olympics were soon to begin and the question was – with the completion of the Olympic Games, would Sydney still be able to maintain the same level of values as those that had been established as the 20th century came to a close?

It was Sydney that was driving the nation, in sharp contrast to the New South Wales property market of recent times. The 10 year period from the commencement of the 21st century saw some remarkable surges in markets that had always seemed to be relatively secondary in the Australian context.

Sea change became a new word in the property landscape, which opened up vast new areas of Australia’s coastline and gave credibility to the markets which had previously been lacking. Now real estate agents in so many of these centres became to seeing interstate buyers and people from other regions arrive in town keen to purchase. Anything with water views or close to water beach amenities suddenly was being re-rated upwards.

Perhaps the biggest beneficiary of all of this was Queensland with its vast coastline and seemingly endless opportunities for a new lifestyle based upon the philosophy that it was no longer critical to live in the major cities. Other markets to benefit from this included Western Australia and NSW. The strength of these new momentums changed a lot of the relative values. Suddenly, Melbourne was no longer dearer than Brisbane – the situation that always existed before.

Areas in Sydney became lacklustre when compared to the coastal based centres of NSW. As prices in Australia increased at varying rates all of this was to be challenged by the global financial crisis. As always, those markets that surged in value were the first to be repriced and reassessed.

Suddenly members of the community had greater affinity for original locales. The first properties to be sold were the ‘lifestyle’ ones, resulting in a large number of properties coming on the market. Markets such as Adelaide and Melbourne – which had seen relatively little surge during the golden years – came into their own. They became the more successful markets in recent years.

The battered Sydney market received an enormous injection of confidence, particularly from the first home owners grant, and as the first decade of the 21st century ended it was better balanced and more active than it had been for years.

Not only were the first home owner markets in a state of recovery but strength was returning to the more expensive properties bordering Sydney Harbour, which began to have their best results for quite some time.

In addition, new trends emerged. Suddenly it was important for people to be living close to work and other amenities with many examples of families living in apartment buildings, which were previously regarded as ‘non-family’ abodes.

For some, it has become preferable to live in a two bedroom flat at Bondi Beach rather than the big homes that have been built on large blocks in Sydney’s Western suburbs, even though the apartment at Bondi Beach may only comprise two bedrooms for a family of four. (Recent reports suggest that Australians have been building the world’s largest average sized home.)

It’s also clear as this decade comes to an end that Australia has avoided a dramatic downturn in prices that has been experienced in many other parts of developed economies. The current support for the mid to up market properties is quite significant and will form the basis for a strong 2010.

It’s all very well to have a strong first home owners market but at the end of the day it’s the upmarket that will ‘pull through’ in setting levels of confidence that percolate right through market structures.

Predictions about the future of the real estate market are as changeable as the statistics, but recent figures from the leading real estate group Ray White show that the Auckland market is tightening in favour of the seller. Figures for June and July 2009 for Ray White in the greater Auckland area show that the average number of days on market has dropped to 37.5 from 53 in January and February – a reflection of the reduced stock over winter and a growing pool of buyers.

The pressure is forcing would-be buyers to up the stakes: at the height of the property boom, in mid-2007, properties were selling for an average of just 2.1% below the listing price. As the slump began, buyers started to pick up relative bargains, with sales at an average of 8.3% below the listing price in August 2008. As the market has tightened, so too has the gap between sellers’ expectations and buyers’ hopes, with an average sale price of just 3.9% below the listed figure in July 2009.

The speed of turnover is reflected in the number of sales: the second quarter has seen a 25% rise in the number of properties sold in the up-to-$1 million range (4,781), compared with 3,815 in the first quarter.All this is happening, says Ray White New Zealand CEO Carey Smith, against a backdrop of ‘self-cleansing’ in the real estate industry. “The recession has prompted a significant decline in both agents and offices, with a turnover of agents in the market of 52% in the year to February 2009.

 Times like these demand a rise in the quality of service and results for vendors and buyers.”Ray White has responded to this demand with a new service, Ray White Concierge. The service, free to Ray White clients, takes care of all connections and disconnections of services, including telephone, internet, gas, electricity and pay TV. The service also offers helps with home loans through Loan Market, and  insurance with Sovereign.

The progressiveness of Ray White in the area of IT and customer usability has been in evidence for several years; the company was the first real-estate agency to list on TradeMe, in 2005, and each office has its own web presence.

“It remains an intensely competitive industry, and the quality of service and access to information is what sets agencies apart from one another,” Mr Smith says. “We have developed Ray White Concierge as part of our response to that competitiveness – after-sale service is extremely important and is an area where some agents fall down.”