Inside the strategy keeping real estate giant REA Group ahead of its rivals
From newspaper listings in a Melbourne garage to a $27 billion tech empire – inside the culture that transformed Australia’s biggest property platform.
In 1995, realestate.com.au began in a garage in Melbourne’s Doncaster when the founders looked at the huge number of newspaper real estate ads and decided to put them online.
Three decades later, REA Group is the world’s most successful real estate platform, with a sharemarket capitalisation of more than $27bn.
Despite the success in revolutionising property sales around the world, REA Group remains at heart a technology company, says chief technology officer Steve Maidment .
“Whenever any of us go to a barbecue, you end up finding someone who tells you it’s their favourite app,” Maidment says. “And I imagine they probably think of us as a real estate company, and that works for us. But what’s really been key to our success is believing we’re a tech company internally, and saying it means you inherit that tech culture and it means that you can really depend on and trust the teams to innovate and trust them with that decision-making.”
The company is built around giving tech teams – design, product and engineering staff – the freedom and space to innovate. It retains the spirit of a start-up by having what Maidment describes as a federated structure, where small teams work close to customers and consumers.
“We believe, and we always have, that smaller teams made up of really smart people working on problems is much more effective than that top-down, centralised approach that most larger companies employ,” he says.
“Those smaller teams work with independence, allowing them to experiment with ideas, products and features, and because they’re close to the customers and consumers they get a fast feedback loop, allowing them to iterate at a really high velocity.”
REA Group also keeps an eye on any processes it develops that stand in the way of innovation. Maidment says process is like legislation – hard to remove once it’s in place – and REA Group systematically identifies and removes process and bureaucracy where they hamper innovation and solving real world problems.
Another important difference from other large companies is that it doesn’t give its tech team “projects” to work on.
Instead, it has long-running teams with long-running missions. The teams are asked to improve something, such as a certain product or app, and because the teams have been together for a long time, they trust each other and they understand what each of them is good at and can bring to a problem.
Along with a company structure that supports nimbleness and innovation, REA Group invests significantly in developing and training its talent. Its staff completed 60,000 hours of training in the past financial year.
Half of the company’s employees have voluntarily signed up to the REA AI academy, which aims to give tech and non-tech staff foundational skills in artificial intelligence to help them increase productivity.
“We think that AI is here to elevate our folks, and so that’s certainly the way we look at it, and I think that goes a long way to motivating people to want to learn about it, because they’re not scared that it’s going to replace their job,” Maidment says.
REA Group gives all employees access to enterprise-grade large language models and – most importantly, says Maidment – permission to use it.
The company also runs an annual hackathon, which has become legendary in the Melbourne tech community. The week-long event starts with individuals pitching their ideas to get engineers, designers and product people on their teams so they can pursue them further. This year’s event included 700 employees in nine teams across four countries, working on 156 different ideas.
The best of the ideas are selected and supported, and Maidment says the ultimate reward for teams is seeing their ideas go live and get used in the business or on one of REA Group’s real estate platforms.
The REA Group Springboard to Tech Program aims to reduce barriers for women entering the tech industry. Some 33 per cent of the company’s tech staff identify as women. It is an industry-leading figure, but the company is pursuing more female representation.
The program is open to internal and external candidates who want to transition to or return to a career in tech. The candidates are hired on a permanent basis and provided with formal training, mentoring and coaching opportunities for 12 months.
The company’s graduate program is designed to develop the next generation of engineers and tech leaders.
Graduates are taken on for 18 months, during which time they are rotated through different parts of the business and then potentially offered a full-time role at the end of the program.
All the participants from the past two years were offered permanent roles, and Maidment says the marketing and finance departments have seen the program’s success in developing talent and so have launched their own graduate programs as well.
