aussiehome.com is proud to be a Gold Sponsor of the REIWA Spring Into Action Conference being held next Friday the 8th of September at the Perth Convention Centre.

aussiehome.com will have a display booth outside the conference hall so please be sure to drop by and say hello and don't forget to ask for your aussiehome.com chocolate frog (... yes really).

The great line up of presenters including Lee Woodward, Matt Church and Mat Steinwede are sure to impress, entertain and inform. aussiehome.com Director Charlie Gunningham will be introducing Mat Steinwede on the day.

Time, tide and technology wait for no man or woman and nowhere does this apply more than the world of the Internet.

As you know aussiehome.com is constantly working on the services we offer and carrying out improvements to the database that serves up your property data and to this end, one of our latest improvements is going to be the increase in size of photos on the site.

With the increase of broadband usage, which means faster file loading time, and the move by many people to 1024 pixel wide screen settings, it has become practical to move our photo size to 800 pixels wide by 600 pixels minimum high.

As this means a change for many of you entering data, we will be contacting each office over the next few weeks to ensure a smooth change over. The actual change over date is Monday 18th of September which will also give us the time to make considerable changes at aussiehome.com.

A postive spin off of this change will be a higher quality of photos displayed on www.realestate.com.au for those of you who feed to that portal, and larger photos displayed on aussiehome.com and also (if you like) your own site too.

We're often asked about our perspective on the real estate market, and whether 'we see things first', given that thousands of properties are being updated, added, archived, sold or have a price change every week on aussiehome.com. Is the market turning? Is demand still there? Is more stock coming on?

The answer is patchy - although we can see demand is still very strong, and listings are still very low. Despite doubling our real estate client base in the last 3 years, there are still 1000 less properties (about one third less) than in 2003, as has been the case all calendar year.

Another interesting pointer has been the reduction in the proportion of 'fixed listing prices'. Take a look at a typical suburb, such as Claremont where we have 38 current listings...

• 11 are already under offer (29%)
• 5 have a 'price from ...'
• 4 are for auction
• 3 ask for 'expressions of interest'
• 5 are 'price on application'
• leaving only 10 (26%) with a stated listing price

As we are hearing, even those with a price often receive many offers above that listed. And considering 'expressions of interest' is such a new database option on our system and is already being widely used and accepted, this surely points to a continuing hot property market.