KEY POINTS:
The battle to be top dog in online property advertising has escalated into an all-out turf war.
Trade Me and the Real Estate Institute of New Zealand's site, realestate.co.nz, have been embroiled in marketing combat since the latter launched on the internet in August. Trade Me has laid an Advertising Standards Authority complaint, and is about to take out its first newspaper advertisements.
As property advertising migrates to the internet, the print media industry - Fairfax recently bought Trade Me - is positioning itself to take advantage of online advertising. Terrified the media will control costs, the real estate industry has set up realestate.co.nz, owned jointly by REINZ and six major agencies.
Alistair Helm, chief executive of realestate.co.nz, said: "There's a chance for the industry to take ownership of its own destiny, rather than let the major media companies dictate."
Realestate.co.nz has many more listings than Trade Me - 74,000 versus 29,000, as of Friday. However, Trade Me Property, set up in July 2005, gets more than double the visitors to its site - 468,584 to realestate.co.nz's 217,412, according to Nielsen/Netratings. Realestate.co.nz says its own monopoly on listings will eventually lure visitors.
It has been marketing itself as "the only place with every place". But the Herald on Sunday understands this slogan is the main subject of TradeMe's complaint to the authority, due to deliver its decision this week. It is widely speculated that it will partially uphold the complaint.
In the next couple of weeks, Trade Me will run newspaper advertisements encouraging home owners to list their properties with it for $99, or insist that their real estate agents include Trade Me Property in marketing.
"That is 180 degrees against statements they've made as recently as a month ago in regard to the wastefulness and ineffectiveness of print advertising," says Bryan Thomson, chief executive of Harcourts, one of the big six behind realestate.co.nz.
Trade Me commercial manager Mike O'Donnell agrees the site has "slagged off" advertising. "But Bryan Thomson said he always got a great result from newspaper ads, so we thought we'd take a leaf out of his book."
Trade Me is also targeting its membership and estate agents with emails. "If your agent doesn't use it [Trade Me Property] then change your agent," it told members.
