An embarrassing technical glitch in realestate.com.au's email servers meant real-estate agents did not receive queries from prospective home buyers for up to two months.
The glitch was discovered on Thursday last week after agents received a slew of email queries from realestate.com.au that were up to eight weeks old.
Real Estate Australia (REA) CEO Simon Baker said the glitch delayed 16.6 per cent of all email leads.
Agents, who pay about $650 a month to have realestate.com.au connect them with home buyers, are furious and baffled as to how such a seemingly basic error at a high-tech internet company could go unnoticed for so long.
The delays meant many leads were lost and agents complained of damage to their reputations caused by the significant delays in following up queries.
"The print analogy would be like me giving money to the print media for a full-page ad and the ad not appearing. What's the compensation?" said Craig Pontey, director of Ray White Double Bay.
Mr Baker, who admits that this is the most serious issue to affect the company in its 11 years of operation, explained that it was created when the company upgraded its email servers, a process that began eight weeks ago.
"During that process there was a bug which meant that some emails, not all by any stretch of the imagination, were being stored but not delivered to agents and thus, when we identified the issue, we immediately sent them on to the agents," he said.
Robert Simeon, director of Richardson & Wrench Mosman, said he and other agents began receiving bulk loads of email queries from realestate.com.au late on Thursday afternoon.
REA first notified agents of the glitch via email late the next day, but Mr Simeon said this was too late as his staff had already contacted the buyers, unaware that the queries were months old.
"The gross incompetency by REA in this entire matter then resonates throughout all the agents because we're the ones left to contact these people about their online inquiry, which was made months previously and remains unanswered until now," he said.
"This is like forgetting to put the postage stamp on the envelope ... it's fundamentally that simple."
Mr Baker said realestate.com.au had since contacted buyers whose queries were delayed and told them of the glitch so as to protect the reputations of the agents, but Mr Pontey questioned whether this was true.
Both Mr Simeon and Mr Pontey were certain that REA discovered the glitch only after being alerted to it by agents late last week.
REA, which is yet to provide agents with any compensation, said it identified the issue on its own while performing more mail server upgrades last week.
"I don't know how many sales it may have cost me - it might have cost me no sales at all but it certainly cost me reputation in my business getting back to these people quickly," Mr Pontey said.
"They [buyers] just think that the agents don't care and in this market buyers are gold; they need to be treated with respect."
Asher Moses | The Age | 25 June 2008
The Age owned by Fairfax owns domain.com.au #2 in online real estate
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