Going Global – Organic Growth Case Study
During my time as CEO of the REA Group, we grew the business from a small operation based out of Melbourne, Australia with 25 people to a global business, operating in 11 countries and 720+ employess. In the process we increased revenues from $4m p.a. to over $155m p.a. and went from a loss to a strong profit.
One of the most frequent questions i am asked is how did you take the business from a purely Australian operation to a global focus. This is not a simple question to answer so i thought i would write a series of blogs on this topic. The first blog is about organic growth and how the REA Group entered the New Zealand market.
In early 2005, it was becoming clear that realestate.com.au would be the dominant residential player in the Australian online property market and that its commercial site, realcommercial.com.au would also be the leading commercial portal site. The question then became “what do we do next”?
Early on we clearly knew that online real estate was the core business of the company and that moving into other classified segments was not what we would do. Therefore, following a discussion with the head of sales for Australia, Shaun Di Gregorio, we decided that we would look at New Zealand to test our ability to start up and operate in a new market.
We selected New Zealand as it has a similar real estate market, many of the companies that operate in Australia also operate in New Zealand, there was demand from expat New Zealander’s to search for listings in New Zealand, the New Zealand market was “hot” and it was roughly the same time zone. The objective was to reduce the risks associated with starting a operations in a new country and at the same time to learn about how we can do it – and to really work out IF we can do it.
To further minimise risks, we took a slowly, slowly approach. Instead of starting up a new site in New Zealand, we added a map of New Zealand to the realestate.com.au website – therefore focusing on driving people from the Australian site to look at the New Zealand site. To build content in the New Zealand section, we hired a team of New Zealand “back packers” in the Melbourne office and had them call agents in New Zealand to get them to sign up and also to upload their listing onto the site.
This approach worked and relatively soon afterwards we had competitive content and a valid offering. As we drove more and more traffic to the New Zealand section of the site, we became confident that we could launch a New Zealand only site and we launched allrealestate.co.nz. (Unfortunately realestate.co.nz was owned by the main competitors in the New Zealand market.) For a while we maintained the sale team in Australia however as momentum built, we put a team on the ground in New Zealand (made up of New Zealanders).
Today allrealestate.co.nz is a serious player in the New Zealand market. It is used by around 50% of the NZ agents and has over 200,000 UB’s per month visiting the site – just behind realestate.co.nz (and a fair way behind trademe.co.nz/property - the real estate section of trade me). However, what is more important then the absolute numbers is the fact that 50% of the traffic to the site comes from outside of New Zealand – bringing a whole new audience to New Zealand properties.
Lessons Learned:
- It is better to do than think too much – therefore once you have a reasonable idea of what you plan to do, put in place an organised experiment to test your hypothesis
- Keep your initial organic growth options simple and executable
- Try to reduce the risk of new market entry as much as possible by leveraging what you already have (e.g. sale team in Australia)
- Don’t strive for too much too early (e.g. starting up in Russia would have been a challenge)
- Reduce investment to the minimum to trial the concept
- Need a different proposition – we used the proposition “advertise on allrealestate.co.nz and reach a global audience looking at New Zealand listings”
- Once you are onto a good thing, accelerate
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Simon, what’s wrong with starting up in Russia?
It cost a little to drop an anchor in developing or transitional emerging market now, but it’ll be a priceless source of the information and experience. A relatively small website can secure #1 place in some Russian region (not Moscow), gain reputation and be a gateway when you think the time is right.
Plus, think about one more flag in international bar!