Harcourts as a group do not subscribe, each franchise makes its own decision. At this time the collective decision of this group of franchisees is they will not subscribe for all their listings. This exactly the same response from the Harveys franchisees.

These 2 plus Barfoot & Thompson, LJ Hooker, Ray White and Bayleys are the shareholder group that collectively own 50% of Realestate.co.nz Ltd.

Of these only Barfoots’ and Ray White are actually contractually signed to Trade Me as a group ie. 100% of all offices and all listings.

I would contest the assertion that placing listings on Trade Me will sell more houses – it will certainly ensure more of NZ eyeballs will see a property – but how many active buyers are there in NZ – the fact is that at anyone time there are around 35,000 (in a good market) – so with Trade me it is a fairly large scatter gun approach with a massive overlap of eyeballs with our site and agents own sites, after all real estate purchase is far from spontaneous!

I recall that they are part owners of realestate.co.nz website, so placing their listings on Trade Me, while it will increase sales for their agencies, will result in some red faces for a little while.

Your comments are interesting, I have watched Trade Me closely on this area of business especially as they caught the real estate market off guard in 1995. At that time RealENZ was a website that whilst it enjoyed great support from the industry, the consumer saw little value.

What happened in 2006 though with the replacement of that site with realestate.co.nz was a big step forward by the industry. Trade Me has not had it all their own way in the property market.

Realestate.co.nz is still the most comprehensive website in the market – currently we host over 109,000 listings across all categories of real estate – even on a like for like basis our content of residential listings at 85,000+ represents over 95% of all licensed agent listings as compared to Trade Me with 77,000 (which includes private listings). We enjoy support from over 1,300 offices as compared to Trade Me with an estimated 800 offices.

Certainly when it comes to traffic Trade Me is king with upwards of 52,000 average daily UB’s as compared to realestate.co.nz with 11,500 – however a key question is how many active property seekers are there in NZ on a daily basis. The likelihood is that they look at both Trade Me and our site to see a total picture – ours for the comprehensive agent listings and Trade Me for the private sales.

It is also worth highlighting that there are still a number of large real estate groups that choose not to use Trade Me.

Anyway I thought it was important to share some information to support your post.

Alistair Helm
CEO – Realestate.co.nz