First, as big as it is, Wal-Mart has a deep and personal relationship with its customers. Loyal Wal-Mart shoppers are incredibly invested with the brand so in many ways it makes sense to try to help those customers in all sorts of ways beyond just the weekly retail shopping experience. Wal-Mart helps folks cash checks, and so on.

Second, strategically I doubt this is about Real Estate specifically. Since the deal looks to be an Oodle partnership, I would imagine that it is part of a broader strategy to leverage the considerable consumer traffic Walmart.com gets to its site and channel it into some monetization/share of wallet around secondary goods (think eBay and Craigslist).

They're smart folks there in Brisbane, but it can be challenging for them to channel traffic to non core businesses. So it will be interesting to watch how this evolves.

Personally, I think Walmart purpose is not to get into real estate but to use the listings as a “life event” identifier for their clients. When buying or selling is typically the time when shoppers purchase alot of products and Walmart wants to be in front of them at that moment. They will probably run this beta test then start to incorporate some type of offer for users to shop back at walmart.

More importantly is this issue…

“Do people know that they aren’t seeing all the listings? “

As there are more and more sources of to advertise listings and this will become a bigger and bigger issue and consumers are becoming more more sophisticated in searches as evident by the long tail searches of 4 words or more now.