The website of realestate.co.nz has recently celebrated its 2nd birthday – during this past 2 years the website has firmly established itself as the most comprehensive source of real estate listings in NZ. Currently the site hosts over 105,000 listings, some 20,000 more than any other similar website.
The website grew from the ashes of RealENZ, a website originally set up by the Real Estate Institute in the early 90′s – at the time an innovative and far sighted decision, however as time moved on and the web exploded, the capabilities of running a property portal website far outstripped the focus and resources of REINZ. It was for this reason that realestate.co.nz was borne as a separate company – chartered to act as an independent commercial operation to attain a strong position in the online real estate market and secure for its customers (the professional real estate industry) a protection against the aggressive pure profit motives of media owned competitor websites.
Realestate.co.nz is now the clear No.2 in the market behind Trade Me in terms of traffic of visitor, but still holds the coveted No.1 spot for content. It is further interesting to note that realestate.co.nz is (I believe – and I have researched this) the only industry owned website that holds a top position anywhere in the world.
Coupled with this rich content and largely as a result of it, the site has steadily and consistently grown traffic – up over 80% as compared to 2 years ago – far outstripping the growth of the market,
Overall traffic now exceeds 275,000 unique browsers per month, within this total are around 95,000 unique visitor from outside NZ using the website more and more to review the property market as returning ex-pat kiwis, new immigrants and overseas investors. The website is simply the more valuable answer to every question about real estate in New Zealand!
Allied to the enormous reach and appeal of the website is the fact that with such a deep and comprehensive database lies a rich history of information and statistics which I intend to present in the coming months. For whereas historical property sales data looks back to activity in the market up to 3 months in the past, the website traffic and enquiry level to agents tends to be a key “lead-indicator” looking to the prospects of future sales in the next 2 months. In addition the website can drill down to look at what people are looking at and where they are looking from. It is the power of the web that provides this rich repository of information; it is our role in running the website to make sense of this mass of information.
I propose to present and analyse regional as well as national statistics which I hope will be of value to all people interested in property for personal or business reasons.
Congratulations Alistair and the realestate.co.nz team – you’ve done a great job establishing the site as one of the best real estate online destinations anywhere in the world.
Kind words indeed!
To be successful and deliver a quality service relies on content – for that we need, value and really appreciate the support of all our customers – the real estate industry who subscribe and support the website.
Congrats on two years Alistair. The Trade Me Property team tip their hats to the realestate.co.nz team.
Look forward to catching up over a coffee soon.
Brendon Skipper
Head of Trade Me Property.
Thanks guys – I feel a bit embarrassed – I never meant to write this as a self-congratulations blog post. I just wanted to lead into the stats accessible through the benefits of the site.
Hi Alistair.
Great to see the comments to the left there. This will make it so much easier for people to keep track of what is being said.
One more suggestion – why don’t you put the title of the blog that the comment relates to. This should keep it a bit more organised.