Domain’s aggressive attack on
Realestate.com.au’s audience
What is the cost of “FREE”?
There’s an old saying in marketing: if the product is free, you’re the product.
From 1 July 2026, Domain began offering agents something that sounds too good to refuse — FREE professional real estate photography (unlimited photos), FREE floor plans, FREE Matterport 3D virtual tours and FREE aerial drone photography. Depending on the property, that’s somewhere between $500 and $1,000 of “professional” property marketing material per listing, depending on the size of the property. And here’s the kicker: you can use it all on realestate.com.au too.
Free photos. Free floor plans. Free 3D tours. Free drone shots. What’s not to love?
Well… the maths. Before we run that, let’s first understand the 2 major players in this duopoly.
Two portals, two very different owners
Realestate.com.au has been around since 1995 and has dominated Australian property search for most of that time. It’s operated by REA Group, majority-owned (roughly 61%) by News Corp — deep pockets, long incumbency, and the default first stop for Australian property seekers.
Domain is the long-time challenger — born out of Fairfax, then majority-owned by Nine Entertainment — until August 2025, when it was fully acquired by US property giant CoStar Group in a deal valuing Domain at around A$3 billion.⁸ Six months earlier, in February 2025, CoStar had also completed its US$1.6 billion acquisition of Matterport — the 3D virtual tour technology itself.⁹ CoStar’s stated playbook, honed in its battle against Zillow in the US with Homes.com, is simple: spend big, price aggressively, and buy market share. In its own words, the mission in Australia is to “deliver more, for less”.¹⁰
Read in that light, the free media offer isn’t generosity — it’s a well-funded land grab. Domain now owns the Matterport cameras, and CoStar can afford to give the media away as a loss leader to chip away at realestate.com.au’s stronghold. A smart strategy, you say?!? Let’s look at what agents are actually being asked to pay for.
Domain vs Realestate: where the audience actually is
Before we talk about FREE, we need to talk about who’s actually looking at your listings. The most reliable audience data in Australia comes from Ipsos iris — the official online audience measurement service that both portals quote in their own marketing.
Here’s the picture:
| Metric | realestate.com.au | Domain |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly unique audience | ~13.05 million ¹ | ~8–9 million ² |
| Share of Australia’s online adult population | Over 60% ¹ | — |
| Monthly visits (Oct 2025) | ~161.8 million ³ | ~55 million ⁴ |
| Audience lead | +5.5 million people, growing 14% year on year ⁵ | — |
Domain is genuinely growing, particularly under CoStar — and they’ll tell you so loudly. Fair enough. But total audience isn’t the number that matters to an agent deciding where to spend. The number that matters is how much of each audience is unique.
Paying to reach the same audience twice
Those two audiences aren’t separate crowds. They overlap. Massively. Most Australians hunting for property check both portals.
Domain’s own advertising, quoting Ipsos data, put it plainly: of their roughly 6 million monthly audience, about 1 million people don’t visit realestate.com.au.⁶
Read that again. By Domain’s own numbers, their exclusive audience — the buyers you can’t already reach on realestate.com.au — is around 1 million people.
Against a combined property-seeking audience of roughly 14 million Australians, that’s about 7% of the market.
So when you subscribe to Domain on top of realestate.com.au, you’re not doubling your reach. You’re paying to reach roughly 7% more people – at best. Everyone else already saw your listing on realestate.com.au.
So what is the cost of FREE?: Let’s do the math.
The free media offer isn’t a gift — it’s bundled into a Domain subscription reported by agents to run as high as approximately $4,000 a month for the full (zone) package. That’s about $48,000 a year.
So the “free” photography, floor plans, Matterport tour and aerial shots only make sense if the value of the media you’d otherwise pay for outweighs the subscription. Simple maths:
| Your listings per month | Media value received (at $500–$1,000/listing) | Subscription cost | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2 | $1,000 – $2,000 | ~$4,000 | You’re well behind |
| 4 | $2,000 – $4,000 | ~$4,000 | Break-even at best |
| 6 | $3,000 – $6,000 | ~$4,000 | Ahead — if every shoot is top quality |
| 8+ | $4,000 – $8,000 | ~$4,000 | Ahead on media value |
So, unless you’re consistently listing 4–8 properties every single month, the “free” media doesn’tcover thesubscription. You’re paying a premium for photography with a free sticker on it. And even at high volume, remember what the surplus is buying: access to that ~7% slice.
$48,000 a year. For 7% exclusive audience – at best.
What could that money do instead?
Here’s where it gets interesting. Who are those 1 million people who use Domain but not realestate.com.au? They’re not hiding in a bunker. They’re on Facebook, Instagram and Google — Domain knows this, which is why their own Audience Boost product promotes listings on those exact platforms.⁷
So ask yourself: do you need to pay ~$48,000 a year for a portal to reach them, or could you reach them directly at a fraction of the cost?
- Targeted Meta advertising — property ads served to active buyers by suburb, budget and behaviour, not a national average
- Google advertising on local property search terms
- QR codes on signboards capturing genuine walk-by and drive-by buyer traffic
- Ramp up your own networked database and email marketing — buyers you already know
- Social content and video built from professional photography you actually own
The difference? Precision. A portal shows your listing to whoever turns up. Targeted real estate marketing goes and finds the buyer.
Could you drop realestate.com.au and just use Domain?
Let’s flip it, because this is where the whole thing snaps into focus.
If Domain’s exclusive audience is ~1 million and the combined market is ~14 million, then realestate.com.au’s exclusive audience — people Domain can’t show your listing to — is somewhere in the range of 5 to 7 million buyers. That’s roughly 40–50% of the entire market.
No agent can stand in a vendor’s lounge room and justify making their property invisible to nearly half of Australia’s active buyers. Which means realestate.com.au isn’t optional. It’s the baseline.
And that’s the trap in the free offer. Domain isn’t replacing your realestate.com.au spend — it’s stacking on top of it. The subscription is pure additional cost, and the only thing it buys beyond the bundled media is that final ~7% slice.
The questions nobody’s answering yet
The fine print on this offer reportedly isn’t even locked in. Which raises questions worth asking before signing anything:
- Who owns the copyright on the photos, floor plans and Matterport tours? You, or Domain?
- Can you keep using the media if you leave Domain — on your website, your social channels, your listing presentations?
- Can you cut the photos into video content? Because video isn’t part of the offer — you’ll still be paying for property video separately, and you’ll want the rights to use those “free” images in it.
- Who actually shoots it? A contractor pool at national scale, or a professional accountable to you? Can you request the same photographer twice? What happens with reshoots, weather delays and dusk shoots?
- What does “unlimited” mean in twelve months, once the introductory land-grab is over?
Signing a contract worth up to ~$48,000 a year while the other side is still writing the terms is a decision worth sleeping on.
The lasting thought
Domain’s free media offer is a smart, aggressive move in a two-horse race — a genuine attack on realestate.com.au’s stronghold, and honestly, the competition will probably be good for everyone.
But free is a price tag, not a value. Run your own numbers: your listing volume, your current portal spend, the ~7% you’re actually buying, and what that money could do in the hands of sharper, targeted property marketing.
Because the most expensive thing in real estate marketing has never been photography.
It’s paying $48,000 a year to reach buyers who were already looking at your listing.
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