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Project Overview

realestate.com.au saw a 222% increase in mobile visits in the year to June 2012 and has had 1.2 million downloads of its iOS and Android apps. Custom-designed for people researching, viewing and sharing property on the go, the apps offer geo-location and interactive map-based searching across Australia’s most comprehensive property listings. They make it easy to bookmark favourite properties and plan ahead with an in-built inspection planner and in-app directions. realestate.com.au’s iOS app is consistently among iStore’s Top 10 Free Lifestyle Apps in Australia. The Android app has received 5 star reviews from 226 users to date.

Organisation

REA Group

Team

Ben Thomas, Jay Kim, Jesse Collis, Myles Abbott, Oliver Jones, Peter Caddy, Sam Page, Sean Woodhouse, Aiden Steele, Ken Wong, Kevin O'Neil, Luke Cunningham, Matthew Dalton, Nick Paton, Yori Mihalakopoulos, Alex Barnett, Mujtaba Hussein, Sun Long, Stew Gleadow, Mike Rowe, Steve Holloway, Nigel Fernandes, Dave Cameron, Pez Fowler, Leiz Hang

Project Brief

As Australia’s number one property site, realestate.com.au, wanted to provide a mobile experience to supports user throughout their property journey.

Not only did it need to offer a first class geo-location and listing-based property search, it also needed to keep helping buyers after they'd found properties they like by assisting them in the planning of the Saturday morning rush to get to open for inspections and auctions.

For sellers, the app needed to present properties in an attractive and professional manner, taking advantage of rich media and native capability to genuinely motives potential buyers to reach out to agents with enquiries.

Project Innovation / Need

Our initial objective was to build fresh and innovative new features for iPhone, iPad and Android to support the needs of buyers, sellers and renters throughout their property journey.

Stage 1: Starting out on the property hunt

• Intuitive list and map-based search across Australia’s most comprehensive property listings
• Search refinements by price, features, property type and surrounding suburbs
• Built in GPS technology, to allow users to see which properties are for sale and rent in their area
• Drag and release to refresh search results

Stage 2: Getting serious about property

• View full-screen photo galleries
• Bookmark your favourite properties to review at another time
• Share listings
• Contact an agent to enquire about a property
• See full listing details of every home to buy and to rent

User Experience

From our earliest versions, our aim was to give house hunters the tools they needed to find, view and share property on the go with the same ease of use that makes realestate.com.au Australia’s number one property site.

We believe consumers are best placed to rate the user experience of our apps and what we know is:

• More than 1.2 Million downloads of our iPhone, iPad and Android apps to date
• Our iPhone and iPad app is consistently among the Apple iStore’s Top 10 Free Lifestyle Apps in Australia (#4 on 31 July 2012) and receives comments such as: “Still the best real estate app”; “Well done you obviously listened to everyone :-)”.
• The Android app has received 5 star reviews from 226 users to date.
• Visits using the realestate.com.au smartphone and tablet apps (iOS and Android) increased 222 per cent in the year to June (iPhone/iPad app accounts for approx. 90%).

The project team closely monitors what consumers say about our app and we are constantly planning new features for our next release to make our mobile experience even better for house hunters.

Project Marketing

Our latest universal iPhone and iPad app was launched on 25 June 2012, replacing earlier versions of the app which was first launched in December 2010. Our latest Android app was released on 23 March 2012.

Recognising that around 30% of realestate.com.au’s traffic comes from mobile devices, we put serious resources behind our marketing campaign to make sure the house hunters who love our site can also benefit from our mobile apps.

We promote each new release on realestate.com.au of course, including floor ads and video. We also promote our mobile apps through digital advertising across premium sites, print advertising in 88 News Limited metro and community newspapers, and we recently ran an eight week radio campaign on the Austereo network.

To launch our iPad app in August 2011, we commissioned some research on property and the future of technology which resulted in 88 pieces of media coverage across print, online, trade media and radio.