myhome.com.au (Updated 9/2008)

myhome.com.au is a recent entrant to the Australian property portal landscape.  Launched in 2007 as a joint venture by Publishing & Broadcasting Limited (PBL) and Microsoft, the site promised take on the encumbents realestate.com.au and domain.com.au at their own game. 

However after only 1 year and investment of over $20m in building and marketing the business, the business was sold to Shane Dale of Surroundpix for a reported $1.5m.

myhome.com.au continues to operate in the Australian market and is estimated to be in 5th place. 

Ownership | Market Position | Key Measurements | Market Coverage | Advertising Model | Financials | Site Sections | Technology | Key Management | History | Recent Press

Ownership

Shane Dale, the owner of Surroundpix Pty Ltd, acquired myhome.com.au in June 2008.

Market Position

rmyhome.com.au is the sixth ranked site for residential property in Australia (as at July 2008).  For an overview of the Australian property portal sites, click here.

Key Measurements
(as at July 2008)

• 113,000 unique visitors each month (Nielsen Netratings)
• 1.5 m page impressions (Nielsen Netratings)

Market Coverage

All of Australia.

Advertising Model

myhome.com.au is currently free for agents to list properties on MyHome. It is designed to be an industry only advertising site with no private listings allowed.

Revenues are generated by third party advertising and offering agents the ability to upgrade their property listings.

Financials

It is estimated that the current revenue earned by myhome.com.au would be less than $500k per annum.

Site Sections

The key sections of the website are:

• Homes for sale
• Homes for rent
• Selling your home
• Research
• Finance
• Lifestyle
• MyHome TV

Technology

To be completed.

Key Management

The key management are:

• Shame Dale – Owner

History

In August 2005, ninemsn.com.au, the joint venture between PBL and Microsoft, decided to sell its nearly 6% stake in market leader realestate.com.au to News Limited for $2 per share.  This transaction sparked a failed take over bid by News Limited to buy all of realestate.com.au Ltd.  Little did people know, that this was clearing the way for PBL and Microsoft forming a new joint venture, myhome.com.au, to enter as a direct competitor to realestate.com.au in the Australian market.

Launched in 2007 with much fanfare, myhome.com.au was one of the most anticipated new sites in the industry. Whilst on the surface it looked promising with a Web 2.0 interface, myhome.com.au failed to live up to the hype. A launch it was slow, confusing to navigate, and agents who didn’t subscribe had listings appear on the site and old listings peppered the search results. The troubles at launch damaged much of goodwill attached with the hopes of a new competitor in the market.

As part of building out the myhome.com.au offer, the purchased Surroundpix Pty Ltd from

Helping drive the usage of the site was an extensive marketing budget that included a “My Home” TV show on the Channel 9 network. At its peak, myhome.com.au managed to attract around 500,000 UB’s the site, significantly short of their projections and the market leader, realestate.com.au, who had nearly 4m UB’s.

In February 2008, rumours emerged that myhome.com.au and homehound.com.au were in talks of merging. While these did not eventuate, myhome.com.au did close its doors in May 2008.

June 12th 2008 brought MyHome a new lease on life. Shane Dale purchased took over as sole owner and announced that MyHome would be a free listing site and would receive a huge overhaul.

Recent Press

No link to recent press releases

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