International Property Journal - News and information on global property markets

Shares in SouFun Holdings Ltd., which runs China’s largest online property site, jumped 73 percent on Friday after the company’s initial public offering in the United States.

In a shaky season for IPOs, the offering was seen as a success, pricing the company at a bit more than 14 times earnings. Two private equity firms, Connecticut-based General Atlantic and London-based Apax Partners, each announced plans to take a 19 percent stake in the company, a key player in China’s fast-growing online property business.

After months of negotiations, the National Association of Realtors and Move Inc. reached a new agreement that will allow changes to Realtor.com, the most-viewed real estate site on the Internet.

Under terms of the new deal, Move, the Nasdaq-listed company operating Realtor.com, will be able to make “innovations” to the site without prior approval from NAR. The new “clarity and alignment” to the 14-year-old agreement will allow Move to “drive faster and more competitive improvements on Realtor.com,” according to a press release.

U.S.-based HomeAway, which has quickly grown into the largest vacation-home rental operation in the world, is moving into sales.

HomeAway Real Estate will offer more than 200,000 listings at launch, drawing from vacation home clients and listings feeds, such as ListHub, according to a company spokesperson. HomeAway describes the new entity as “the first online marketplace dedicated to buying, selling and identifying vacation homes with rental potential.”

Google launched an extensive marketing campaign in Australia this week highlighting the integration of real estate listings and Google Maps.

The star of the new campaign is a character named “Peg Man,” who is seen in videos searching Sydney for a home. (Example below). The search giant is also teaming with of Sydney’s largest agents, LJ Hooker, to dot the city with life-size versions of the pins found marking locations on Google Maps.

On the cool scale, Microsoft’s new mapping technology gets an 11.

Microsoft “architect” Blaise Aguera y Arcas showed off “augmented reality” mapping at the Ted conference, drawing gasps from an audience of experienced entrepreneurs and techies.

Shares of U.K. property portal Rightmove leapt this week on news that the company had successfully increased the fees it charges estate agents.

Rightmove announced that it expects 2010 earning to beat forecasts, in large part due to a boost in advertising revenue from agents. Some agencies are paying as much as 20 percent more in exchange for new services, the company reports.

Agencies were offered a choice of rate increases or the chance to stay at last year’s rates if they agreed to buy at least £200 (about $314) worth of extra products per month, Estate Agent Today reports.

Real estate marketing strategies in the U.S. represent a “major disconnect” with the industry’s own consumer research, according to a new survey of property firms.

A mountain of data tells real estate executives that consumers use the Web for their property research. For example, a recent report by the National Association of Realtors found 90 percent of consumers start their real estate search online.

Yet, 76 percents of firms spend less than 30 percent of their marketing budgets on digital marketing, according to a survey of “hundreds of real estate firms” by the Brandeis University International Business School, sponsored by inSegment, a digital marketing company.

By some accounts, Google’s move into U.K. real estate was a death knell for Rightmove, the dominant U.K. property portal. Rightmove’s stock initially plummeted in the wake of the announcement, with analysts lining up to explain how brokers will welcome Google’s free service over Rightmove’s annoying pay-per-play model.

"It will certainly blow Rightmove out of the water,” Sarah Beeny, host of Channel 4’s Property Ladder and a site owner told a reporter after Google went public with its plans. “You can only get your property listed on that site if you are an estate agent--what Google will do is level the playing field and they are doing it for free.”

That’s why Friday’s announcement that Rightmove is linking with Google Maps raised more than few eyebrows. The mega-portal will use Google Maps for all its property listings, while additional uses for Google Maps are "now in development."

Brazilian property portal Brazilian Homes last week joined U.S. giant Zillow in introducing rentals to its site.

“As a result of the growing Brazilian tourism market, we decided to start offering rental properties as part of our Brazilian property portfolio,” senior partner Alexander Wasastjerna said in a press release. “We have many clients who have purchased properties in Brazilian hotspots through our company, and we want to help our clients generate healthy rental returns for their property investment in Brazil.”

Brazilian Homes says the rentals are fully booked through March. “Over 90 percent of our bookings are coming from Brazilian tourists from the bigger cities further south in Brazil, and the rest is from foreign tourists who prefer to rent an apartment rather than booking into a hotel,” Wasastjerna said.

Shares in property portal Rightmove dropped 10 percent  in the wake of news that Google was extending its property offerings in the U.K.

"It will certainly blow Rightmove out of the water,” Sarah Beeny, host of Channel 4’s Property Ladder and a site owner, told the BBC. “You can only get your property listed on that site if you are an estate agent--what Google will do is level the playing field and they are doing it for free.”

Google has announced similar services in the United States and Australia, part of what many analysts see as a concerted move to become a first-stop for consumer property searches. Google allows free listings, integrated with Google maps and others services.