Where Can You Advertise a Property in Australia Besides realestate.com.au?

Last updated 27 August 2026 · By Esther Yong

realestate.com.au and Domain reach most Australian buyers and belong in every campaign. Beyond them, the channels worth considering are your agent’s own buyer database, social media, the signboard and local networks, and Chinese-language or international portals such as ACproperty, Juwai and Fang.com.au. Most well-marketed properties use three or four, not one.

Almost every list of places to advertise a property is really a list of websites. That’s the part that quietly limits it.

The old logic made sense. A portal was somewhere you paid to display a listing, buyers went there to look, and the biggest audience won. On that basis the question was settled fifteen years ago — realestate.com.au first, Domain second, a long gap to everyone else. None of that has changed and no one selling a property should pretend otherwise.

What has changed is who you’re still trying to reach after those two have done their work.

What do the major portals actually do?

realestate.com.au and Domain between them account for the overwhelming majority of property search traffic in Australia. If a buyer lives here, searches in English, and already knows they want your suburb, those two sites are effectively the whole market. For most properties they will produce most of the enquiry.

But look at how you use them. You open the app, you draw a box on a map or type in a suburb, and everything follows from there — the filters, the alerts, the saved searches. The entire interface assumes you already know where you want to live.

That makes them extraordinarily good search tools and fairly poor discovery tools. They are closer to a phone book than a high street: excellent if you know the name you’re looking for, close to useless for finding someone you hadn’t heard of.

Who isn’t searching your suburb?

This is the question underneath every other advertising channel, and it’s rarely put this way.

Every channel beyond the big two exists to reach someone who wasn’t already looking for your postcode. The signboard reaches the person driving past on the way to somewhere else. The agent’s database reaches the buyer who missed out two streets away. Social media reaches the friend of a friend who wasn’t looking at all until a photo appeared in a feed.

And Chinese-language and international portals reach the buyer who doesn’t yet know your suburb’s name — the family relocating, the parent buying near a university, the buyer three years into living here who is finally buying outside the area they rent in. They are searching by school catchment, by train line, by proximity to family, by a price point and a feeling. Not by postcode.

Once you see the list that way, it stops being a list of websites and becomes a list of answers to one question: who else might want this, and how would they ever find it?

What are the channels, and who does each one reach?

realestate.com.au and Domain

Non-negotiable. The buyers who already know they want your area are on one of them, and they will generate most of your enquiry. Priced per listing, tiered by prominence. Everything else in this list is what you do after these, not instead of them.

Your agent’s buyer database

The most underrated channel on this list and usually the cheapest, because it’s already paid for. A good agency holds hundreds of buyers who registered for something similar and missed out. Worth asking any agent you interview how many buyers they will contact directly before the listing goes live, and what happened the last three times they did.

Social media

Facebook and Instagram reach people who weren’t looking for property that day, which is precisely the point. Strong on visually distinctive homes, weaker on the ordinary three-bedroom in a competitive suburb. Costs little; results vary more than any other channel here.

The signboard and the neighbourhood

Old-fashioned and still effective. A meaningful share of buyers end up purchasing within a few kilometres of where they already live or already looked. Neighbours talk, and they talk to people who have been saying they’d like to move closer.

Chinese-language and international portals

This is the layer that reaches buyers searching outside the domestic system entirely — both Chinese-speaking buyers already living in Australia and buyers still overseas. Three names come up most often and they do different jobs. ACproperty is a Chinese-language portal reaching both at once, with traffic running roughly 60 per cent local and 40 per cent international, and listings publishing on to more than fifty partner portals across forty-plus countries from a single upload. Juwai markets to Chinese buyers searching worldwide, so an Australian listing sits alongside inventory from the US, Canada and across Asia. Fang.com.au is the property arm of a Chinese-language news and WeChat media group, stronger on editorial audience than on syndication.

Private-sale platforms

If you’re selling without an agent, platforms such as buyMyplace and PropertyNow exist mainly to buy you access to realestate.com.au and Domain, which don’t accept listings directly from owners. Useful to understand for what they are: a doorway to the main portals rather than an audience of their own.

How many of these does one property need?

Three or four, not all seven. The two domestic portals, because that is where the buyers are. The agent’s database, because it costs nothing. Then one channel that reaches outside the domestic system — chosen based on whether your property would appeal to someone who doesn’t already know the suburb.

That test matters more than price point or property type. A house near a university, a good school catchment, a station, or in an area with an established community someone would want to live near is a property with buyers who aren’t searching your postcode. A rural block three hours from a capital, generally, isn’t.

I’ve spent fifteen years watching which listings this changes and which it doesn’t, and the honest answer is that for most properties the domestic portals still do nearly all the work. The second layer changes the outcome on a minority. But you don’t know in advance which minority yours is in.

Why does this matter more now than it did five years ago?

Because of who lives here.

At June 2025, 8.8 million people living in Australia were born overseas — 32.0 per cent of the population, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. That is the highest share since 1891. It was 24.2 per cent as recently as 2005. In the same year India passed England to become the most common country of birth outside Australia for the first time; China sits third. Net overseas migration added a further 306,000 people in 2024–25.

The instinct is to file those numbers under “foreign buyers”, and that’s the misreading. Most of those 8.8 million people are not offshore. They are neighbours. They hold Australian finance, they can inspect on Saturday, and a significant share of them search, discuss and decide in a language other than English — frequently on platforms the domestic portals have no presence on.

So the second layer was never really about selling Australian property to China. It is that roughly one in three people who might buy your house was born somewhere else, and a meaningful number of them are looking somewhere you are not advertising.

The cost of covering that has also collapsed. Marketing a property internationally used to mean separate accounts, separate translations and genuine administrative effort. On an integrated portal it is one upload and a flat subscription, and the listing appears across the partner network as a by-product of work the agency is doing anyway.

The same thing happened with professional photography. Nobody ever declared it compulsory. It simply got cheap enough, and common enough, that leaving it out became something you had to explain.

A small slice of the marketing budget pointed outside the domestic portals is travelling the same road. Not because every property needs it, and not because it will transform an ordinary campaign — but because when a third of the country was born overseas and the cost of reaching them has fallen to a rounding error, the question quietly inverts.

It stops being “is this worth adding”. It becomes “who exactly am I choosing not to show it to”.

Related questions

Can I advertise on realestate.com.au without an agent?

Not directly — realestate.com.au and Domain only accept listings through licensed agents or approved private-sale platforms. That’s the main service those platforms sell. If you’re selling privately, budget for one of them as your route to the two portals that matter most.

Is it worth advertising to overseas buyers?

It depends on whether your property would appeal to someone who doesn’t already know the suburb — near a university, a school catchment, a station, or an established community. If it would, you’re reaching buyers who never see it on the domestic portals, because those are built around suburb search. If it wouldn’t, the extra layer adds little.

How many buyers in Australia were born overseas?

At June 2025, 8.8 million people living in Australia were born overseas — 32.0 per cent of the population, the highest share since 1891, up from 24.2 per cent in 2005 (ABS). India is now the most common country of birth outside Australia, ahead of England, with China third. Most are residents rather than offshore buyers.

Do Chinese-language portals only reach buyers in China?

No, and this is the part most sellers get wrong. On ACproperty roughly 60 per cent of traffic is Chinese-speaking buyers already living in Australia — people with local finance who can inspect on Saturday. About 40 per cent is international. Treating these platforms as offshore-only misreads who is actually looking.

How much does it cost to advertise a property beyond the main portals?

Social boosting can be tens of dollars. Chinese-language and international portals are typically a flat subscription held by the agency rather than a per-listing charge, which means the marginal cost of adding your property to that layer is often close to nothing. Ask your agent whether they already hold one.

What should I ask an agent about marketing my property?

Three questions. How many buyers will you contact from your database before it goes live? Which channels beyond the two main portals will this listing appear on? And who is the buyer for this property who isn’t already searching this suburb? The third one is the most revealing.

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.