Elders Real Estate signs deal with rural listing site Farmbuy.com

Rural property listing site Farmbuy.com is now selling rural properties from Elders Real Estate.

Farmbuy.com is Australia's largest dedicated rural property listing site, with more than 13,000 rural and lifestyle properties listed and more than 50,000 visits every month.

Elders started listing on December 1 and now has 1,500 to 2000 properties on the site. This represents about 60% of Elders’ properties, and this is expected to increase by the end of the month.

Elder is the biggest agency by sold value on the website. First National Networks lists the most properties, but these are mostly lifestyle properties under two hectares according to Farmbuy.com founder Philip Sondhu.

After starting up in 2009, the site has approximately 450 agencies advertising through the site. It generates revenue from monthly agent subscriptions and display advertising from companies looking to reach an Agribusiness audience.

Elders sold 8,338 properties for a combined total value of $3.23 billion in the 2010 financial year.

“We've been lucky to have had great support over the journey from Australia's major agents and have been pushing hard to feed our users more properties. Now with Elders, arguably Australia's largest rural agent network,  we give our user base more choice, more rural property and therefore assist them further in finding a rural property which suits their needs,” says Sondhu.

The website has also signed a preferred supplier agreement with the LJ Hooker franchise network.

Sondhu says this is a more difficult task considering the agency is entirely franchised.

“As of two weeks ago we’ve signed a deal with them… We’re expecting a whole bunch of them to come on the next month or two,” he says.

Sondhu is confident many bigger agencies will start listing.

“The next cab off the rank should be the Ray White network.”

The website launched nationwide in 2009 as the only dedicated rural property site. The first companies to list with them were First National Rural Company and Landmark Property.

“The agents really liked it. It addressed something realestate.com.au and domain.com.au weren’t doing.”