Both portals have been busy. Between February and April, REA and Domain rolled out a clutch of feature changes that genuinely affect how listings perform, and most agents I speak to have only half-noticed them. So let me run through what matters and what doesn’t, from the desk of someone who’s still listing properties every week.

REA’s listing depth changes

The big one is the way REA’s premiere and highlight tiers display on mobile. They’ve quietly tightened the gap between premiere and highlight in the search results — meaning a highlight upgrade now sits noticeably closer to a basic listing in visibility than it did a year ago. The premiere price point still buys you the top slot, but the middle tier is doing less work than it used to.

What that means in practical terms: if your vendor is on a constrained marketing budget, the highlight tier is harder to justify than it was. Either commit to premiere or save the money and put it into video and photography. The middle ground is genuinely the worst spot to land in 2026.

The other REA change worth noting is the “Recently Sold” section on suburb pages now pulls more aggressively from the past 30 days. Buyers researching a suburb are seeing fresher comparables. For agents that means your vendor is comparing themselves against more recent sales than they were last year — which can be a help or a problem depending on whether the suburb’s been moving up or sideways.

Domain’s enquiry routing

Domain’s biggest change has been on the enquiry side. They’ve reworked the way buyer enquiries are surfaced in the agent dashboard, and the time-to-first-response window is now visible in your performance metrics. I’ve had two principals tell me their team’s average response time was being benchmarked against suburb peers, and one of them was horrified when she saw her team sat in the bottom quartile.

Six minutes. That’s roughly where you want to be on a weekday during business hours. Anything past 30 and Domain’s data shows a measurable drop-off in conversion to inspection. Whether you trust their attribution or not, the directional signal is real — buyers in 2026 expect faster responses than they did even 12 months ago.

Video and the inspection booking flow

Both portals are pushing video harder. REA has expanded the video carousel position on mobile and Domain has added a “Video tour” filter on search. If your listings don’t have video — even a 60-second walk-through shot on a phone with a stabiliser — you’re filtering yourself out of a meaningful slice of buyer searches. The production cost on a quick video is now well under $200 if you’ve got a half-decent in-house setup. There’s no excuse.

Domain has also tweaked the inspection booking flow. Buyers can now register for multiple inspections in a single suburb in one form. That sounds minor but it’s increased open home registrations across the offices I work with by roughly 20 percent. Make sure your inspection times are actually loaded into the portal — not just in your CRM. I’m still seeing agencies where the times only go live the day before. You’re losing the planning buyer.

The data tools

REA’s PriceFinder and Domain’s Pricefinder-equivalent (yes, naming is confusing) have both pushed deeper into agent-facing analytics this year. The vendor-paid data reports are getting more detailed, which is great for agents who actually use them in the appraisal conversation and a problem for agents who just print them out and hand them over without context.

The CoreLogic data underlying both still has the lag issues we’ve all complained about for years — and for the prestige end of the market, CoreLogic’s own commentary has acknowledged the data gets thinner above $5 million. Use the portal data as one input, not the input.

Sponsored listings and lead-gen products

Both portals have expanded their sponsored content offerings and frankly, I’d be cautious. The “boosted” lead-gen products on REA in particular have a payback profile that’s hard to justify outside the very high-volume offices. If you’re listing 30+ a year and have a clear conversion process, maybe. If you’re a boutique agent listing 12 to 18 properties a year, your money is almost always better spent on better photography, a better video, and better copy.

What I’d actually do

Audit your last 10 listings against the new portal layouts. Open them on a phone. Check how they sit in the search results in their suburb. Look at where the photos cut off, where the video plays (or doesn’t), and how your description reads on a small screen. Most listings I see have a beautiful desktop presentation and a mediocre mobile one. Buyers shop on mobile. That gap is costing you.

The portals are tools. They’re not your strategy. But staying current with how they’re changing — month to month, not year to year — is how you make sure your vendors are getting the visibility they’re paying for.