Open house on home-buyer browsing habits

Melbourne-based business intelligence vendor Yellowfin has struck a deal with the REA Group to provide over 9000 real estate agents access to click-stream data from advertising served on the realestate.com.au site.

The REA Group owns realestate.com.au, realcommerial.com.au and realholidays.com.au.

The deal, made for an undisclosed sum, will enable Real Estate Australia [REA] to give its customers - real estate agents - access to data it tracks on potential real estate buyers browsing its realestate.com.au site.

Glen Rabie, chief executive of Yellowfin told iTnews that the "primary buyer of REA's service" is not a customer browsing the site, but real estate agents.

"REA sells ads to the agents," he said. "Being online, there's lots of click-stream tracking such as which ads potential buyers are seeing, how they move from property to property and their patterns of behaviour".

Under the deal struck with Yellowfin, REA will now provide agents with this new data to help them make better decisions about what sorts of ads to buy, such as premium ads or specific placements.

The reporting has been embedded into the process of purchasing and placing ads - visible when agents log-in to manage the properties they have listed online.

Agents can now make intelligent, knowledge based decisions within the normal workflow and not after the fact, Rabie said.

The new reporting and analytics has been deployed to about 9200 users.