Following Australian Startups and Tech Trends

Today we showcase the story of an exciting venture, from Brisbane, Australia, ApartmentReviews - Australia's Largest Dedicated Apartment Resource , founded by Shane Moore. In a recent email-based interview with Shane, he gave insights into how he is managing and juggling. This is what he has to say in his interview with us: • How long it took before it was up and running From the initial concept to having the first basic site live was around 3 weeks. The current design took another month or so to get right, at which point I started advertising through Google Adsense and posting on forums. • Stage of Venture The site launched in 2007 and since that time I've been concentrating on building traffic and attracting real estate agents to list their details. The next step will be to transition the 30 or so real estate agents we have into paying customers (currently it is free for them). • Which Market Segment Anyone looking to rent or buy a residential apartment. • Customers Any...

Today we explore an exciting venture in the Real Estate Industry - PTY Auctions Pty Ltd . It was founded in 2006 by Gavin Stuart from Sydney, Australia. In a recent email-based interview with Gavin, he gave insights into his venture and how he is progressing with it. This is what he has to say: • Please tell us about yourself, your background and interests? I was responsible for the development and implementation of property applications for PTY Auctions. The development and implementation took approximately 2 years with the majority of that time spent working with the regulators to ensure the service complied with each of the State's regulations. Since 2002, I have been involved in successfully conducting live online auctions worldwide selling ‘speciality coffee’. I also oversaw the development and implementation of a global document storage solution for the International Task Force for Commodities Risk Management – members of this task force include: ABN AMRO, Rabobank, Mitsui, ...

Today we explore an exciting venture in the Real Estate Industry - StreetAdvisor.com.au . It was co-founded in 2007 by Adam Spencer from Melbourne, Australia. In a recent email-based interview with Adam, he gave insights into his venture and how he is progressing with it. This is what he has to say: • Please tell us about yourself, your background and interests? My name is Adam Spencer, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of StreetAdvisor.com.au • Please tell us about your venture/company? StreetAdvisor.com.au is a website devoted to helping people find the best place to live, it’s as simple as that. We have reviews of streets, cities and neighbourhoods from all around the world written by locals in the area. We also have photos, videos, guidebooks, forums and much more. • Who are the people behind this and how it started? Jason Spencer (Co-Founder and co-CEO) and I came up with the idea for a website about helping people find the best place to live. It was an idea born out of frustration with o...

The fourth participant is Suburb View Suburb View is an Australian Real Estate Search Engine. It displays Property listings on Google Maps, and 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 room...

The second participant is the  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. Evaluators 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 pa...