Suburb View

Vishal Sharma Monday, March 03, 2008 , , , , , , 0 comments

The fourth participant is Suburb View

Suburb View is an Australian Real Estate Search Engine. It displays Property listings on Google Maps, Google Earth, has full RSS Feeds, and is also available on the Mobile phone.

As a frustrated first homebuyer, Mark Ferris created Suburb View. In 2006 there were no real estate sites displaying property listings on a map. So he started working on creating these listings in May 2006. He began manually putting properties he liked on a map as major real estate websites had different amounts of listings.
In his words,

Searching for a property meant you visit one site, view 10 listings, click next etc. Then when you saw all of those listings, you would go to another web site and do it all over again. This is just too consuming, so I created the web site to do this automatically. Suburb View aimed to show all of suburb listings first, and then filter the results you don't want.

I have a price range I am interested, and a minimum amount of rooms. Having selected those options, I can see all the listings I want, and using AJAX I can then view the surrounding suburbs. The site is all about data, not page views.

With the ability to view property prices, I can then see where the more expensive properties are. It helps me look for the cheapest house in the most expensive street.
Let us explore bit further how Mark and his startup is going:

Q. How long it took before it was up and running?
A. 3 Months manually adding property listings on a map and 2 months creating the web site to do it automatically.

Q. What stage of your start-up is, stealth mode, beta mode or fully functional?
A. Fully Functional, the site has been running since 2006.

Q. What is the main objective/mission behind your venture?
A. To find myself a property. I could have easily used the 1000+ development hours working a second job to help with my house deposit, but I chose to work on the site to search for a home. If the site helps me, or a visitor save money on a property price or rental then it has been all worth it.

Q. What services it provides it for consumer or customers?
A. Suburb View is a Real Estate Search engine and tries to provide the most real estate listings in Australia in the one place.

Q. What is unique about your venture?
A. On creation it was the first site in Australia to list property listings in Google Earth. Now it provides one of the most available real estate listings to people searching for Property for Sale, and Rental. The site is all about showing as much Property Data as possible, from as many sources as it can search.

Q. What market segment verticals you are targeting for?
A. Australian Property Buyers and Sellers, and people looking to Rent.

Q. What age group of people will be benefited most?
A. There is no Age Group, but the target audience is 18+ as that is generally the demographic searching for a place to live.

Q. How many users are using your services?
A. The site currently gets several thousand unique visitors a day, and using the old property listings, traffic is on goal to double every 6 months.

Q. What sort of marketing you are using to spread the word?
A. Word of mouth. I try to take on all user suggestions, and have the ability to easily change and modify the site.

Q. How are you measuring the success of your venture Are their any special mechanisms, tools in place to monitor the progress?
A. Success will be determined when I find my first house using the site. It took my parents a couple of hours looking for an Investment property on the site, and bought it the following day.

Q.What is the monetizing revenue model Is their any new model, which is being tried?
A. The revenue model is not a priority at the moment. The site currently uses Google Adsense. The site still is maintained week nights and weekends when I am not looking for a property. The main focus is usability, which means Advertising space is limited, and I don't want the site to be a flashing billboard.

Q. Which are the main competitors or major players in this market segment?
A. The Real Estate market in Australia is a mixture of Internet and Print. So you have people paying Real Estate agents to list their property on a Portal, and also in the local News Paper. The technology behind Suburb View is to make searching for all Property in Australia available in the one place. This consists of a customised Web Crawler that collects Property data eg Address, Price, Rooms, Bath Rooms, Car Spaces etc. then links directly to the sites.

The way Google, Yahoo and MSN deal with text for their search engine, Suburb View does it in a way for Real Estate listings concentrating on showing them on a map.

Q. What are the main technologies used behind this start-up?
A. Google Maps, Google Earth. PHP, MySQL, Drupal CMS

Q. What has been the most easy to use, out of box and helpful technology?
A. It would have been the Google Maps API.

Q. Are you using lot of open source tool sets for this?
A. Yes

Q. What is your operating environment (operating system) and what type of database you are using?
A. Linux (Debian), Apache Web Server, MySQL Database, and Drupal CMS for part of the site.

Q. How often do you catch up with others trying similar things and where do you catch up. Do you have dedicated communities in your city?
A. Communication is done via Email

Q. How much money is needed upfront to start a venture?
A. Money has not been an issue. As sole developer I have had no outgoing cost, with the exception of web hosting. The only thing required is Passion. If I wasn't so determined to use Suburb View to find my first house, the site would have been given up long ago.

Q. What are the main barriers in general for people start their venture in Australia?
A. I would say population. The site technically has a limit of how many people in Australia can search for property for any given year. I get some international visitors but there is going to be a point where there could no longer be any growth until the site expands to a world wide Audience.

Q. What are your thoughts on the future trends of your service and market segment you are in?
A. The day Google starts accepting Direct Real Estate Agents listings, the Australian Internet Property listings is going to be in shock.

Q.Do you have any advice for people who want to start their venture
A. Look at building a better mouse trap, and have a passion for what you do.

Thanks Mark for sharing your thoughts. We look forward to hear from you on the progress of Suburb View. All the best for Suburb View and the competition in this carnival.

Continue Reading >>

Evaluator

Vishal Sharma Monday, March 03, 2008 , , , , , , , , 0 comments

The second participant is Evaluator - Australian Property Reports.

Evaluator is a website that aims to make it simple and easy to arrange property valuations, building reports and pest inspections. If you are buying property anywhere in Australia, it is a one stop shop for all your property report needs.

Evaluator also offer fixed prices and guaranteed turnaround times on jobs, so you no longer have to shop around for quotes and waste time following up to get your report. All the report providers are professional, accredited and insured professionals. Their experience and professional skills are backed up by Evaluator’s commitment to quality customer experiences.

Evaluator was started by two IT consultants, Craig Brown and Justin Findlay, in Melbourne after working with some major corporations and the IT providers who service them. They saw what services the Corporates were getting and thought they could create a similar quality experience for Joe Citizen. Evaluator partnered with a web development firm in Melbourne called Get Started who did a great job of creating the face of the business via the website.

Let us now learn more about Evaluator from Craig, one of the founders, on various facets of their startup:

Q. How long it took before it was up and running?
A. Because the business was a part time and after hours affair it took about a year to go from concept to up and running. In the meantime Craig had a baby and finished a masters’ degree, and Justin got a job as a senior consultant to an online business in Monaco. It’s been a busy year and without the help of several friends the business still would just be a pipe dream.

Q. What stage of your start-up is, stealth mode, beta mode or fully functional?
A. Our business is fully live, but we are yet to promote it as the funds are a bit tight. In the next few months we’ll begin a pr campaign targeting our key stakeholders.

Q. What is the main objective/mission behind your venture?
A. The main objective of this venture is to provide an excellent experience to people looking for property reports such as valuations. Basically today getting a valuation organised takes at least a couple of phone calls, and even then you are not certain of the quality of service you’ll get.
Our mission is to increase the customer’s experience when getting property reports.

Q. What services it provides it for consumer or customers?
A. Customers can get Valuations, Building inspections and pest reports. These are usually purchased when people are buying new homes, but are also sought when people are considering refinancing, for insurance estimates and preparing to sell.

Q. What is unique about your venture?
A. There are three aspects to our business that we see as unique;

  • We offer a simple and easy to use online ordering process
  • We tell people how much our fees are up front so you can plan your budget
  • We manage the report providers to make sure the reports are delivered on time and to the right quality

Q. What market segment verticals you are targeting for?
A. Our primary users will be property purchasers and investors, Joe and Jane Citizen. However we plan to market ourselves to referrers such as financial planners, solicitors and mortgage brokers. These groups see many property purchasers each week. By offering good value to our clients we hope these referral groups will give us repeat business.

Q. What type of customers you are targeting?
A. The site is designed to be easy to use and as useful as possible. If you are buying property you really should be getting these reports. Our site makes it easier and quicker to arrange them.

Q. What age group of people will be benefited most?
A. Anyone who buys property will find our site useful. Additionally groups like the mortgage brokers, financial planners and lawyers will find value in it as we can help them help their clients.

Q. How many users are using your services?
A. At the moment our sales are a trickle, but we haven’t ramped up our sales and marketing activities yet. We have received positive feedback from some of the people who have used the site.

Q. What sort of marketing you are using to spread the word?
A. Well, that’s where we are at the moment. The budget is in need of some further investment right now. We are also right in the middle of building our advertising plan for 2008. Keep an eye out in the property industry and you’ll hear about us.
And if you want to invest or help, get in touch.

Q. How are you measuring the success of your venture? Are their any special mechanisms/tools are in place to monitor the progress?
A. Our immediate success measures are making sure all our customers receive excellent service. We hope that this will help spread the word about our business and help build the brand.

Q. What is the monetizing/revenue model? Is their any new model, which is being tried?
A. Basically we charge a fixed fee for facilitating the order.

Q. Which are the main competitors or major players in this market segment? What are the main technologies used behind this start-up ?
A. There are two areas of competition, although as far as we know, no-one is offering the same service today.

The first is from national providers of valuations, building or pest reports, however none of them really have the online sale thing worked out.

The second area of competition of from services such as RP Data and APM who provide statistical estimates on property prices. Our reports are physical inspections by experienced professionals, so this is more of an alternative service than a direct competitor, but people do spend money on these database estimates.

We see there Is a place on the market for database estimates, but think that real estimations by trained and experienced professionals is still important. If your home is an average home on an average street a statistical estimate will work for you, but if a property is at all unique or special the data models tend to show their shortcomings.

Q. What has been the most easy to use, out of box and helpful technology?
A. Definitely our friends at Get Stared made the technology part of our business model painless. We have some phase 2 and 3 plans to increase the back-office automation and extend the services, but at the moment we are pretty happy with what we have.

Q. How often do you catch up with others trying similar things and where do you catch up. Do you have dedicated communities in your city?
A. We did enter our idea in the RMIT business plan competition, but didn’t make the finals. Thyat was a good place to meet like minded people. Also as Justin and I work in the IT industry we know plenty of IT professionals and tap them as we need them.

Q. How much money is needed upfront to start a venture?
A. These days more money is spent on the business side; IP, trademarks, branding, lawyers, setting up the company and our professional consulting time (which we value highly) so including our time this is a venture that costs upward of $50K, but without our time it is less than $15.

Q. What are the main barriers in general for people start their venture in Australia?
A. I feel there is a real lack of connection between ventures like ours which are probably mid sized and the VC/Angel people. It feels like we are too small for them, but what we are trying to do does take a few hundred thousand to do well and quickly.

Q. What are your thoughts on the future trends of your service and market segment you are in?
A. I think we are in the right place at the right time. Like the travel industry before us the property industry is migrating online. Already Real Estate, Domain and others are delivering excellent services fro people looking to buy. Now it’s time for the ancillary services to come online; and here we are, delivering three of the key services people need.

Q. Do you have any advice for people who want to start their venture?
A. Find others who have started their own like ventures (in other industries) and get in touch. Entrepreneurs love to help other entrepreneurs.

Thanks Craig for sharing your thoughts. We look forward to hearing from you on the progress of Evaluator. All the best for Evaluator and the competition in this carnival.

Continue Reading >>