Simon Baker

And perhaps you can get good deals because not everybody’s down there looking at those markets?

Yes. The other thing we’re fortunate about especially in the property portal space is because of the consulting business and people want access to those skills, we’re usually able to get good entry prices because we don’t just bring cash to the table. We bring knowledge, experience, passion, etc. And people are starting to see that. They look at the iProperty story and they say ‘wow you guys got in at average of 12 cents or something and then you’ve helped restructure it and you’ve now got this great outcome, can you help do that with us over here?’

It’s a good story to tell and sell.

Absolutely, and we’ll continue to tell and sell.

I want to ask a question a bit outside your area. What are you making of this group-buying phenomenon?

That’s a good question. I can sort of see value there but it’s also the scale game. It’s the scale game in terms of having a large number of users registered for your service but that’s not easy. Do you move to two or three or four deals a day? If you do does that dilute it a bit?

I think what it does is create an opportunity for a vertical search engine across them all. So instead of having to subscribe to them individually, you can subscribe to a meta search engine that would then aggregate the deals so you can then see what deals are floating out there at any point of time.

So is there long-term value in these things? There might be and I guess there are a lot of suppliers like the small SMEs who are willing to do crazy deals to get into that list. But if you’re an SME selling something half price and then you’ve got to split that half with the Groupons of the world, it’s got to be a loss leader.

And perhaps it makes it difficult to sell at full price down the track.

Yes. I think there was clearly a first mover advantage for Groupon and then you had the Spreets guys, they sold out for $40 million. But I think if I had one of those businesses, I’d probably be selling now. I’ve got a feeling that there’s just a bit of a short-term bubble around it. That’s my gut feeling but I don’t spend my time analysing. I just don’t believe there’s long-term value there.

Any other trends that you’re picking up from the North American market at the moment?

Like I’d tell you.

Aw, c’mon. They don’t necessarily need to be business opportunities.

I’m joking. No, I don’t actually see a lot of things that make me go sort of ‘oh, ah, that’s really quite fantastic and I can’t wait for that to come to Australia’. Nothing jumps out. In the areas that I look at closely, which is really the classified areas, I’d say that it’s pretty much business as usual. The big guys get bigger, small guys continue to find it hard to make ends meet and to create a place in the world.

In the classifieds area how important is the reaction to mobile devices?

You have to embrace it for sure, but I there are two issues. First, it’s another distribution channel that you have to embrace because people like myself wander around with iPads and iPhones and whatever.

But the second issue is you need to understand how people interact with those channels is very different. So how I interact with an iPhone and an iPad and laptop around say property is very different because of both the situation that I use it in and the form factor. I can’t use my finger on the screen of my laptop but I can on the iPad but on the iPhone it’s too small to do too much with. The easy bit is being on all of them, the challenge is being on them all correctly.