Google in Real Estate

The launch of Google Real Estate Search on Google Maps in Australia, the US and New Zealand was a bit of a surprise to the property home sales industry. Google have now announced they are extending the real estate facility into the UK and German markets shortly.
So what are they actually doing? They allow free uploads of sale listings and rentals, obtaining their revenue from advertising rather than from agency subscriptions or one-off payments by owners as do the existing commercial portals.
The sort of problems that one can foresee are spurious listings designed to promote a real estate agency. If you don't have to pay to list, you could put dozens of properties on Google and just respond to queries "sorry we just sold that one, but you might like ...". The biggest battle for every real estate agency is gaining contacts who want to buy or sell, and agencies will try to exploit the Google function to obtain such contacts.
Some agencies do this now on Domain and Realestate.com, by not removing properties after they are sold, to give the impression they have more properties available than they really do have. It will be interesting to see how Google copes with this problem.
Also, Google is likely to end up flooded with properties that have been sold or withdrawn, because there is no incentive to remove your listing.
Given that potential buyers have free access to properties listed on Domain and Realestate.com, it is not immediately clear why they would also go to Google, unless Google can build up significant listings of properties that are not on the commercial portals.
As for the real estate agencies themselves, they have little motivation to encourage Google Real Estate in place of the major commercial portals, because they usually recover the advertising costs of those portals from the vendor. The main losers in all this are likely to be the proliferation of minor bit players in the internet property advertising field, which might not be a bad thing