Which Real Estate Platforms Are Best for Marketing a Property Online?

There is a question underneath this one that almost nobody asks. Not which platform is best, but what each platform is actually for.

What do the major portals do that nothing else does?

They put a property in front of people who are already looking for a property.

That sounds obvious until you compare it to everything else. A buyer on realestate.com.au or Domain has arrived with intent. They have a budget, a suburb list and a Saturday planned. No other channel delivers an audience in that state of mind at that scale, which is why the two portals sit at the base of every serious campaign and why a vendor expects to see both.

So the first answer is unromantic. Use them, properly, every time. Nothing in the rest of this article changes that.

What the portals do not do is create demand. They serve it. Everything else exists to reach people before that intent has formed, or people whose intent formed somewhere else entirely.

Where does a property search actually begin now?

Increasingly, on social — and this is the part most campaigns measure wrongly.

The usual question is whether social media sells property. It rarely does on its own, and asking it that way makes social look like a poor cousin of the portals. But selling isn’t its job. Starting is.

A buyer scrolling Instagram or watching a suburb walkthrough isn’t ready to enquire. They are forming the shortlist that they will later take to a portal to confirm. By the time someone types a suburb into realestate.com.au, a lot of the deciding has already happened somewhere with a feed. Being absent from that stage doesn’t cost you a measurable enquiry — it costs you a place on the list before the list exists.

That is truer again for Chinese-speaking buyers, whose research happens on RedNote and inside WeChat rather than on Instagram. RedNote functions as a search engine wearing a social network’s clothes: its daily search volume reached about 600 million queries in the fourth quarter of 2024, and what people look up is suburbs, schools and lifestyle, reading other buyers’ first-hand accounts before they ever open a listing.

The practical version is that social and video aren’t there to close. They’re there so that when the shortlist forms, you’re on it.

When should a listing be marketed internationally?

The easy answer is prestige stock above roughly A$2 million, where the buyer pool thins locally and widens internationally, and off-the-plan and new developments, where current rules make foreign purchasers possible at all — between 1 April 2025 and 31 March 2027, foreign persons cannot buy established dwellings, while new builds remain open with approval.

Both are true. Both are also a few years out of date as a complete answer, and the reason is the more interesting story.

For a long time, Chinese-speaking buyers in Australia bought in a small number of well-known places. Box Hill and Glen Waverley in Melbourne. Chatswood, Hurstville and Eastwood in Sydney. If your listing wasn’t in one of those suburbs, you could reasonably conclude this audience wasn’t yours, and most agents did.

That conclusion made sense when buyers relied on the previous generation’s knowledge — on where family had bought, and on the handful of areas with established Chinese-language services. It doesn’t hold now, because the research has changed.

A buyer forming a view about where to live today is reading first-hand accounts on RedNote and in WeChat groups, written by people who already live there. Those accounts are not confined to five suburbs. They cover coastal towns, growth corridors, school catchments nobody in the community had heard of a decade ago. The result is a buyer who is markedly more comfortable outside the traditional areas than their parents were.

You can see it in the search data. ACproperty’s own platform data, reported in April 2026, showed searches for Adelaide property up about 30 per cent in the six months to March 2026, measured against the six months before it — in a state that had never been targeted, and one no agent in South Australia would have described as a Chinese-buyer market.

Which is the practical point. You can no longer look at a postcode and decide whether this audience is relevant to your listing. The old map told you where they were. There isn’t a reliable map any more.

That is why international and Chinese-language distribution has quietly moved from something you add to special listings to something a complete campaign includes by default. Not because it will transform every result — it won’t — but because you can no longer confidently say in advance which listings it won’t matter for. ACproperty exists to make that one step rather than several: a single subscription carrying a listing across Chinese-language channels and more than 50 partner portals in over 40 countries.

So how should you actually choose?

Start with the property, not the platform, and be honest about what each channel is for.

The portals are where intent gets served, and they are not optional. Social and video are where the shortlist forms, so they matter most for properties with something to show or something to explain. International and Chinese-language distribution is what makes the campaign complete rather than nearly complete — and unlike five years ago, you can’t rule it out by looking at the address.

The best campaign is rarely the one on the most platforms. It’s the one with no gap you’d have to explain to a vendor afterwards.

Frequently asked questions

What are the best platforms for marketing a property online in Australia?

realestate.com.au and Domain are the foundation and belong in every campaign. Beyond them, social and video reach buyers at the point their shortlist forms, and Chinese-language and international distribution covers buyers who search in another language — a group no longer confined to a handful of suburbs.

Does social media actually sell property?

Rarely on its own, but that is the wrong measure. Social is where a great many searches now begin, particularly for younger buyers and for Chinese-speaking buyers researching on RedNote and WeChat. By the time someone reaches a portal, they are usually confirming a shortlist formed elsewhere. Being visible at the start of that process matters more than attributing a sale to it.

When should a listing be marketed internationally?

Prestige stock above roughly A$2 million and off-the-plan or new developments are the clearest cases. But the broader reason has changed: Chinese-speaking buyers now research suburbs well outside the traditional Chinese-Australian areas, so an agent can no longer decide by postcode whether the audience is relevant.

Are Chinese buyers still only looking at suburbs like Box Hill and Chatswood?

No, and that assumption is the most common mistake agents make. Those suburbs remain popular, but buyers researching on RedNote and in WeChat groups are reading first-hand accounts of areas nobody in the community was discussing ten years ago. ACproperty platform data reported in April 2026 showed searches for Adelaide property up about 30 per cent in the six months to March 2026, measured against the six months before it, in a market that had never been targeted.

Is it worth paying for portal upgrades?

On competitive listings in high-volume suburbs, usually yes, because the upgrade buys position in a crowded result. On distinctive properties with less direct competition, the same budget often does more spent on photography, video, or reaching an audience the portals don’t cover at all.

Related reading: Which platforms work best for Australian agents to generate leads? · What do Chinese buyers use instead of Google, Instagram and YouTube? · How do you reach Chinese property buyers in Australia?

Esther Yong is the founder of ACproperty.com.au, Australia’s largest Chinese property portal. She has spent 15 years connecting Australian real estate with Chinese buyers locally and internationally.