View.com.au to Close as Bid to Break Australia's Portal Duopoly Falls Short

View.com.au is set to close in June, ending Australia's most heavily capitalised recent attempt to challenge the REA Group and Domain duopoly in residential property listings.

View Media Group (VMG), the entity behind the portal, said a restructuring would allow it to redirect resources toward its most profitable and growing divisions serving the real estate and developer market. Parent company Australian Community Media (ACM) will drop the View brand from its newspapers and websites from June, with new property branding to follow.

Although the company confirmed that its property reporting team is unaffected by the closure, job losses are expected. ACM managing director Tony Kendall told staff: "Unfortunately, this closure will mean that a number of roles in [View] will be affected, with some redundancies expected". Kendall moved to reassure staff on the health of the broader group.

"While View.com.au was a bold attempt to reshape the highly competitive residential real estate listings market, its closure will allow ACM to explore new opportunities to strengthen our core business and serve the needs of property buyers and sellers in our regional markets," he said.

RealEstateView.com.au launched in 2001 and was majority-owned by real estate associations before Antony Catalano, former Domain chief executive, and billionaire investor Alex Waislitz took a 26% stake for around A$10 million in 2020, later increasing that to a controlling 72%. VMG was formalised in August 2022.

The venture attracted substantial backing. Seven West Media and ACM combined to put more than A$100 million in cash and media services into VMG, with ANZ Bank adding a further A$50 million for a minority stake and a board seat.

When the portal relaunched as View.com.au in September 2023, Catalano positioned it as a "digital real estate superstore" targeting Australia's A$300 billion in property adjacency categories rather than the A$1 billion digital advertising market. The freemium listings model, map-based search across all 11 million Australian properties, and the promotional reach of ACM's 140 regional mastheads gave View tools that few challengers could have assembled.

The closure follows Catalano's departure from his executive chairman role at ACM last month, after he appeared before Melbourne Magistrates' Court on serious criminal charges and issued a public apology.

At launch, View was generating around 900,000 monthly visits, against roughly 53 million for realestate.com.au and 15.5 million for Domain. Unfortunately for the portal's backers, however, the gap did not close.

REA Group crossed 13 million unique monthly visitors in October 2025. Domain, now under CoStar Group ownership, is investing heavily in marketing as it works to close the gap.