Besides costing even more money, how will this help the revenue...

Besides costing even more money, how will this help the revenue and/or profitability though?

Are renters currently unable to find properties? Those listed via all these new agents recently signed up are already on every other realestate website in the country. As RNT themselves said, the agents upload properties (currently for free) via their software systems, to rent.com.au amongst dozens of others.

As soon as they charge a fee for listing, agent listing will collapse to near zero imo. Renters might have been drawn to the site from the expensive national advertising program - only to find that there are no unique properties that they haven't already seen on RE.com.au and domain, then head off.

The question in my opinion is really just how long they can sustain this for, and whether - on the off chance, someone buys them out for the domain name alone! Maybe a big guy.. but I suspect at a price much lower than this.

Time shall tell.