As reported this weekend in The Weekend Financial Review (click here  to read full article) Charlie Gunningham, a director of aussiehome.com, stated the aussiehome.com portal usually advertised around 700 properties for rent but this figure has climbed significantly to average 1,000.

A number of factors can help explain this. Investment properties bought by interstate landlords over the last few months, looking for a more cost effective investment than the eastern states can provide, are now coming onto the rental market.

Secondly, although buying in Perth is still cheaper than the bigger cities, purchase prices have risen as we well know, so landlords are demanding a higher rental price to maintain a decent yield on their investment. These higher prices may well be forcing renters to make other housing choices.

Once again, we must keep our eye on the WA market, which is forging an independent path from the rest of the country. The eastern seaboard rental market is the tightest it has ever been with bidding wars for rental properties a common occurrence. However, the vast size of our state means there are even variations within WA. The over supply of rental properties in Perth would be more than welcome in the booming Pilbara where it is virtually impossible to rent a home.

Based on suggestions from our focus group we have made some changes and improvements to the client zone.

Data feeding to REIWA: The most challenging requirement we have faced is getting more data to feed across to REIWA and to 'de-bug' how some data was being fed. It must be noted that some fields on aussiehome.com cannot feed across to the REIWA site.

Sale Price data is being fed successfully to REIWA: any agents & reps who want to be considered for awards must make sure that sold prices, price and sold dates are entered and updated before archiving the property.

New Keyword Searches: To make it faster to retrieve properties we have added a keyword search to all property lists in the client zone, including the Home Hunt client list.

Printing Stock lists: You can now print your stock lists for sales and rental listings. The print stock list function gives you the option of how many properties appear on each page and whether or not you want them with images or not.

New Photo Upload: To increase the speed of photo processing you can now upload five photos at a time. In addition, you can see what dimensions your photos are. We encourage you to use 500 X 375 pixels dimensions for all images.

If you have further suggestions for improving our client zone please feel free to email us. Special thanks to the administration ladies who attended our focus groups and contributed their time & ideas.