REA Group: bringing recurring auction workflows into one connected platform

REA Group is a leading global digital business specialising in property. Headquartered in Australia, it operates the country’s leading residential and commercial property websites, including realestate.com.au, and has a network of brands across Australia, Asia and North America.

realestate.com.au is Australia’s number one address in property, reaching more than 12 million users on average each month. Within that ecosystem, Ignite by realestate.com.au is a customer self-service platform that supports residential property listings, developer property listings, listing and campaign reporting, property enquiries and rental applications.

Artisio worked with REA Group to provide auction management software for Ignite, supporting the auction-based sale of advertising space across the platform.

Before Artisio: recurring campaigns, manual handling and platform strain

REA Group’s brief was complex. Rather than selling one-off items, the business manages a large portfolio of advertising spaces that are rented through auctions on a recurring basis. The same location may be sold for a defined period, then prepared immediately for the next campaign cycle. That creates a demanding workflow, with overlapping schedules, changing availability and a constant need to keep customer-facing pages and internal systems aligned.

Before Artisio, much of that process relied on manual effort. New lots had to be created, auction timings updated, website information refreshed and internal records kept in sync across each cycle. Over time, that approach placed increasing pressure on both efficiency and customer experience.

• Adam Waterson, Senior Product Manager at REA Group, described the situation before moving to Artisio: “We were using another vendor to advertise or sell space on our website. Some of the key challenges we had during that time were around platform stability and inability to meet customer demand, and then also access issues. We had a number of time-consuming manual processes, and we were not as efficient as we’d like to be.”

Those constraints mattered both commercially and operationally. A recurring auction model depends on timely publishing, clear visibility of current opportunities and confidence that the platform will hold up at key moments. In REA Group’s case, the existing setup was no longer giving the team the reliability or flexibility they needed.

Why Artisio?

REA Group’s decision to move platforms was driven by the need for stronger automation, a more seamless user journey and a solution that could sit naturally inside Ignite. As Adam explained, “the goal with Artisio was to solve some of those problems and make it easier for customers to do business with REA.”

That customer experience requirement was especially important. REA Group wanted the auction functionality to feel fully embedded within Ignite, rather than bolted on as a separate experience. ‍

• Rob Soh, Senior Business Analyst at REA Group, highlighted that “a key driver for us in choosing Artisio was around the customisation and the integration with our own experience called Ignite.” He also noted that “the Artisio widgets are really nice to use and easy to implement in terms of making sure that the look and feel are quite seamless towards our experience that our customers are used to.”

Alongside the product fit, the implementation process itself played an important role. Rob recalled that the teams worked closely from the outset, with “really frequent communications, once or twice a week, or even more frequently at the start of the project, just to make sure that the requirements were well understood and any of the ambiguities could be sorted out before we started the development.”

That close working rhythm helped shape a solution around REA Group’s commercial model rather than trying to force the business into a standard auction workflow.

What Artisio delivered

Artisio extended its scalable auction management platform to support REA’s recurring rental-auction model and the operational demands that came with it.

One of the most significant changes was the introduction of a rental-based auction structure that allowed the same advertising space to be auctioned repeatedly across campaign cycles. This removed the need to recreate inventory manually each time a campaign ended.

Artisio also introduced automation through API and webhook workflows, enabling REA’s internal systems to trigger the next lot according to its own business rules. New auctions could be created in advance and published automatically on schedule, while the site continued to display the correct campaign information until the next cycle began.

The embedded experience inside Ignite was another key part of the solution.

• Adam highlighted “the access to the widgets that we've been able to embed within our existing customer platform has ensured that it's a seamless experience for our customers, and it's on-brand with what we're offering as part of our Ignite platform.”

At the same time, the platform delivered the real-time visibility REA Group needed to manage auctions confidently at scale. Rob described this as especially valuable, saying that “having a real-time auctioning platform to  serve thousands of inventory items across our customer base is super useful. We can essentially see what bids are being placed in real time, who's bidding on them, and are they using max bids or auto bids.”

The result was a more connected operating model, where recurring campaigns, publishing logic, customer interactions and internal processes could work together with far less manual intervention.

The impact: stronger efficiency, higher inventory movement and greater confidence at scale

The most immediate gains came through efficiency. According to Adam, moving to Artisio “allowed us to sell more inventory to our customers and remove a number of manual processes that not only delivered a better experience, but also freed up time for our sales support team to focus on higher value tasks that better supported our customers.”

The platform also widened access to inventory and improved how customers engaged with it. Adam noted that “since moving to the Artisio platform, we've seen a number of wins already - from the number of bids that we're seeing on items, to the access and platform scalability.” He went on to say that “it's really easy for customers to find the inventory that they'd like to purchase as part of the new platform, which means we're selling some suburbs that haven't been sold for a number of years.”

Rob’s comments also point to the platform’s value in maintaining transparency and operational confidence. With real-time access to bidding activity, REA Group could see how auctions were progressing and how customers were interacting with them. In his words, “all this information in real-time gives us a lot of confidence to make sure that we're providing fair and transparent auctions for our customers.”

That visibility matters in any auction environment. It helps internal teams act faster, supports cleaner reporting and strengthens trust in the auction process itself.

A platform that could adapt with the business

REA Group’s feedback also reflects the value of flexibility over time. Rob pointed to Artisio’s web app and widgets as giving the team “a lot of flexibility if we wanted to in the future change up the experience or make some modifications based on some customers’ feedback.” That ability to respond to customer input and evolve the experience is especially important in digital environments where expectations move quickly.

The collaborative spirit was key to the success of the project.

• Rob described the Artisio team as “really accommodating in helping us to really drive our vision forward for helping out our customers,” while Adam’s overall assessment was equally positive. He said REA Group would “absolutely recommend Artisio, whether it comes from the technology stack, the product construct, or the support they provide.”

Empowering auction excellence

REA Group’s use of Artisio sits outside the traditional auction-house model, yet the underlying lesson is highly relevant for auction businesses and for any company exploring auction-based sales as a route to growth.

Where recurring inventory, customer experience and system integration all matter, the auction engine has to do more than run bidding. It has to support automation, scale and visibility across the whole workflow. In REA’s case, Artisio provided that foundation, helping turn a repetitive, manual process into a more connected and efficient operation.

For businesses considering how auctions could expand their own commercial model, that is exactly the kind of shift that matters.

Find out more about Artisio AMS today by booking a demo.

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