another 20,000 r.e agents just lost their job

http://www.business2.com.au/2011/06/realestate-com-au-backs-down-from-the-fight/

Realestate.com.au Backs Down From The Fight!
by Glenn Batten, on 10th June, 2011

...And there we were waiting for the outcome until an email about 30-40 minutes ago.
Because of the instant delivery of email its a golden rule to send good news on Monday morning so its at the top of the inbox when the recipient arrives at work and conversely to send bad news late on a Friday so it loses gets lost amongst the clutter. So its not surprising to see that when its really bad news its released on a Friday just prior to a long weekend so its buried deep!!

Greg Ellis has just notified agents by email that effectively immediately the minimum levels of service have been in the Private Listing Policy are no longer to apply.
The real effect of this for traditional bricks and mortar agencies are that with service criteria totally gone private listings can now effectively engage one of these digital real estate agents to list their property on realestate.com.au. When you combine this with the fact that we have unlimited accounts and can list as many properties as you want any licensed real estate agent can now create a business to list property on realestate.com.au and charge a small fee. As long as they get enough clients to cover the base subscription its going to be profitable.

...with RealEstate.com.au backing down from this fight Private Sellers are going to have a stack of choices now to get their property listed on the realestate.com.au portal. How low will they go ? One guy operating from his bedroom might be able to offer listings on realestate.com.au for just $30 or $40 a pop because he is getting private seller listings form all over Australia. How will vendors react to paying higher VPA levels for a realestate.com.au listing through a traditional real estate agent?