A Random Person’s Random Investments

Some good:

• http://www.realestate.com.au - appears to be the most popular. Agents incredibly slack to keep their listings up to date though, about 1/3 of the listings seem actually sold if you try and follow them up.
• http://www.domain.com.au - second most popular? cleaner layout, but harder to use than realestate.com.au, a lot of overlap. And they keep emailing me listings of “new” properties that are also listed as “just sold” on the same page. What?
• http://www.property.com.au/ - realestate.com.au with a “web 2.0″ skin.. much nicer to use. Unifinished but shows potential
• http://www.myhome.com.au/ - slick, not as many listings
• http://www.homehound.com.au/ - also nice, bit a bit more overlap. good use of google maps. Not enough ranges for limiting search selections. 150K-200K, then 200K to 400K? Why can’t I put in both upper and lower limit? Its my search.

Some needing work:

• http://www.zeroagents.com.au/ - very nice site, but few listings, a pity as it is direct (no agents)
• http://www.owner.com.au/ - more listings than zeroagents it seems, but not massive, web design firmly located in 1997. One property I in there I googled showed up as being sold by and agent after it was apparently (no dates?) listed..
• http://www.diysell.com.au/ - another very nice site, but not many listings, only 16 for all of Melbourne when I checked.
• http://www.noagentproperty.com.au - ugly, linear and hard to navigate site, but has more listings than the others.

I am a fan of the concept of agentless sales, but with all the listings spread over a range of mostly terrible quality websites the current state isn’t good. If they were all listed in zeroagents.com or diysell it would be great.