The Ad Network was founded in 2008 by Beth O’Brien out of a passion for new media technology and the need for innovative marketing and business strategies.

Forming an impressive team, including her brother Ben Pullicin, O’Brien set out to carve a niche in the competitive world of real estate online advertising.

“We have built a business as a brother-and-sister team that competes every day with News Corp and Fairfax,” O’Brien says.

O’Brien says real estate is the number one subject Australians search online every month, which means the business must be on its game in order to outdo its competitors.

“We are a real estate-obsessed nation – we monetise this web traffic and we’re the first company in the world to do this for real estate agents,” she says.

In addition to a Sydney office, The Ad Network also has an office in New York, ensuring the business maintains its global scope.

“We have a powerful advertising network, which targets over 1.5 million people every month in real estate,” she says.

“We have worked hard and made huge sacrifices to make it happen in a global financial crisis. And it’s working, and almost profitable, after less than two years of operation.”

Raking in revenue of $600,000 last financial year, the business now employs six staff. But prior to its growth, The Ad Network was marred by a few mishaps.

O’Brien says dealing with real estate agents proved to be an important learning curve.

“Everyone warned me but I had to learn for myself – a contract means nothing, even if it costs $15,000 to get a fancy law firm to draft it. It’s all about the relationship and trust,” she says.

“The guy that signs the contract can be there one day and gone the next. If there is no relationship between the businesses and its people, it means nothing. If your business is not operational in their business, it isn’t real.”

O’Brien says the best part about starting a business is making it happen, which can only be achieved with belief.

“Going to bed stressed out if we can pay wages and waking up at 3am to find an email to say we just signed $25,000 [is the best part of starting up],” she says.

As a sales person regardless of whether you’re selling real estate or real estate websites, a pivotal point in your success is justifying to a client why the service, product or asset is worth the investment outlay. In real estate web development this can be a difficult task, especially if the client sees very little value in the web. However, this is now become a whole lot more easier thanks to a service offered by a company called The Ad Network.

The Ad Network is a specialist digital agency which focuses in real estate advertising representation. They’re basically the middle person between advertisers (who wish to market their products and services) and website owners (who’s audience is the advertiser’s target). The Ad Network perform all of the leg work in finding an advertiser who matches your website profile, looks after the contracts and the relationship, serves the ads on your website and then provides you with a quarterly cheque for the advertising revenue your site has made.

From a recent press release:

“The Ad Network represents Australia’s biggest Real Estate Agents, including Raine & Horne, Century 21, First National, Richardson & Wrench and Laing + Simmons with exclusive advertising rights. They have also established themselves as Australia’s leading real estate industry network, working with a variety of partner sites within the real estate industry including Myhome, Rentfind, Homeloanhints and the Real Estate Institute of NSW.”

You might wonder how this links in to your own real estate agency website given you are not operating a head office website. In recent times, The Ad Network has seen a strong demand for targeted local area marketing, where advertisers are looking to promote their goods and services to a specific audience in a particular geographic area. In an industry first The Ad Network placed ads on an individual office website Richardson & Wrench Mosman (here Sales Results and Property Page along with their sales and news alerts). These ads were negotiated independently from the R&W network and relate solely to Richardson & Wrench Mosman with the reported advertising fee being 5 figures each month.

This is quite a significant return for RWM given the average website outlay is in the thousands not tens of thousands. Obviously, the normal real estate agent website would initially not attract this type of advertising revenue but over time through building up a readership and audience it is possible. Basically, the more people that come to your website, the more revenue you can potentially make.

If you’d like to find out whether your website is suitable for advertising, you can contact Rowena Gupta at The Ad Network rowena@theadnetwork.com.au.

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ADVERTISERS will get direct access to the websites of the nation’s largest real estate agents for the first time in a deal that could see existing real estate sites left out of the loop.

Companies including LJ Hooker, Century 21, Laing and Simmons, First National and Richardson & Wrench have signed deals with the recently launched advertising sales company, The Ad Network, which will represent the sites to advertisers keen to reach consumers with a demonstrated interest in buying property.

Beth O’Brien, managing director of The Ad Network, claimed the sector could be worth as much as $10 million in coming years, with banks, insurers and carmakers all showing an interest in advertising directly on estate agents’ sites.
She said the entry of Google to the real estate market as a map-based listings aggregator had grown the potential for consumers to side-step sites such as Fairfax’s Domain and REA’s Realestate.com.au (in which News Limited, publisher of The Australian, owns a 60.7 per cent share).

The plan to bolster advertising on agents’ sites coincides with a move by Carsales.com.au, which is part-owned by PBL Media, to launch an online classified real estate brand, homesales.com.au. The majority privately-owned company is listing on September 10. Carsales chief executive Greg Roebuck said it was an opportunity to leverage Carsales’ expertise in working with private sellers.

But Ms O’Brien said there was a power shift under way.

“Their (real estate agents’) traffic is increasing phenomenally and for them it is now about generating revenue from the right brands and from premium brands,” Ms O’Brien said.

“The new Nielsen NetView data shows that a significant percentage of traffic does not go to sites such as Domain and Realestate.com.au.”

Figures for June revealed more than 2 million people visited real estate sites, led by Realestate.com.au with 1.351 million and Domain.com.au with 547,000.

LJ Hooker was the leading single agency website with a unique audience of 144,000.

Ms O’Brien said she believed advertising placed directly on the real estate company websites would be worth $2m-$3m in the first year.

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