RealEnz drop the ball

We moved into our current house 2 years ago and when we bought we had some very loose criteria – except that we knew exactly which part of the city we wanted to buy in. Agents soon learnt not to suggest “one suburb over” and we learnt to trust them to call us when something came up. Vincent, may favorite at the time would get a call when I saw an ad in the paper…
“Hi Vincent, just saw the ad for …”
“Yes, but it’s on this street, next to X and across from Y”
“Ok, sorry for bugging you Vincent, you will call me though won’t you”
“Yes, I will”

In the end we “phished” and did a letter box drop, got 6 replies, 3 to view and bought 1.

But this post is about the Real Estate Institute of New Zealand, and their website at RealEnz.co.nz. Two years ago I hounded that site too, and emailed their webmasters about the things I didn’t like.

To me it’s inconceivable that, 2 years on, the following issues still exist:

• You can’t bookmark a property, or find one and then email the link to your partner, parents etc because the site is tied up in javascript and frames
• You can search by a few criteria but you can’t save that search in your bookmarks to allow a quick return
• When you sign up for email alerts you can’t filter on keywords as you can with the online search
• When you get the alerts the suburb isn’t shown on the email so you have to visit the page and frequently the images are broken
• Having visited the page there is no easy way to get to the main Realenz site.
• A link for a property, from the email looks like this: http://www.realenz.co.nz/res/wizardreport.cfm?ID=%27%28%3DO%5E%22PHL%200%20%21%0A which isn’t easy to replicate for a property coded #40847, but if they can do it for the wizard, why can’t they do for all the pages?