Squiiz future queried by John McGrath

The prospect of Squiiz becoming a successful property sales portal has been dismissed by estate agent John McGrath at an REB Leadership Series event for network bosses.

“The electronic classified game is over. REA has won and Domain is a strong second competitor,” he said.

“REA is making hundreds of millions of dollars, and they’re reinvesting it in technology, people, branding and marketing," said John McGrath, who is a non-executive director of REA Group.

The evidence from around the world suggested industry-owned portals such as Squiiz were unable to compete with specialist businesses.

"I don’t think Squiiz was ever going to work,” he said.

Century 21 chairman Charles Tarbey told the event it was too early to dismiss Squiiz, which was fighting for recognition in the same way that the two big portals did in their early days.

“We’ve got to remember that we’re the ones who control the data and we’re the ones who feed that data to REA and Domain,” he said.

“It’s a very hard battle, but Squiiz was never designed to compete with REA or Domain.

"It was designed as a platform for us to consolidate our data as an industry.”

Squiiz, which has just released an app, is confident it can capture 100 per cent of national listings by the end of 2016, its chief executive Nick Christian said.

The site was launched last November with the Squiiz site having almost 200,000 listings on day one.