The Unconditional Blog

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Archive for the ‘mobile’ Category

3

Mobile real estate – its the smarter way to search for property

Posted on: April 11th, 2012 | Filed in Featured, mobile, Technology, Website searching

It seems that there’s really only one smart way to search for property in 2012 – that’s on a mobile device. Over the past week the usage of mobile devices to access real estate listing content blew through yet another new record.

A staggering 1 in 5 of property hunters used a mobile device to find property information – 22% of all views of listings on realestate.co.nz were undertaken on the go, from a mobile device. That’s a massive increase from just 8% a year ago.

Even more impressive is the fact that mobile users engage with the mobile app far more than the website – it is turning out to be very “sticky” – the average visitor using the app views 37 pages per visit as compared to just 11 on the website. People clearly recognise the real value of having real data in the palm of their hand.

The key fact to bear in mind when it comes to mobile, is that users on the mobile platform are by-and-large more likely to be seriously active property seekers. The mobile is not a “lean back experience” as the web can be with super-glossy wide screen images, the mobile is about information. Location details, listing details, great photos and easy contact to the agent by phone, email or text.

 

Choice of mobile device

When it comes to the choice of device the most popular was the iPad – it represented nearly half of all mobile usage in March. On the iPad the app though only represented 20% of users with the other 80% of users choosing to view the website on the device. The iPhone represented 40% of all mobile users in the month with a 60/40 split between the app and the web. Android came in 3rd with 14% of all mobile users, although it is fast catching up ground, with a 6 fold increase in the past year; its usage is evenly split between app and the web.

There are some interesting insights of mobile usage which surprise some people. Mobile usage is not restricted to just the main cities and large towns, in an average month, every single listings we have in the database with an address is viewed at least once. That shows the mobile app is used right around the country when discovering property around you for sale or rent from Kaitia to the Bluff!

 

NZ’s favourite real estate app

The app is clearly NZ’s favourite real estate app, blasting through 70,000th downloads and only growing faster by the day – an average week sees around 1,200 downloads, in the 4 days over Easter we saw over 1,600 downloads; taking us ever closer to 100,000 downloads in the next few months.

In the month of March over 85,000 visitors opened up the app to discover property for rent and for sale right around them, letting them make better house hunting decisions whilst out-and-about.

 

New Advertising

To further accelerate this rate of download and usage we are delighted to have our partner Westpac undertake another extensive advertising campaign on bus shelters and on TV. Our partnership with Westpac is mutually beneficial adding value to Westpac customers to help them in the home buying process by showing them a smart way to house hunt on the go with the app, as well as info on local branches, ATM’s and also contact details for their Mobile Mortgage Managers.

 

International Benchmarking

It is always useful to compare NZ uptake and usage of real estate mobile with key developed markets such as UK, Australia and the US.

The data for the UK is not the most recent; the leading website for real estate in the UK is Rightmove, back in August last year they reported in their half year report that 14% of access to listing was via the mobile, I am sure that has grown significantly since then.

In Australia the leading website of realestate.com.au reported that at December they had reached 700,000 downloads of their mobile apps. With a population 5 times that of NZ this means that our activity level is about half that of Australia.

In the US the leading website of Zillow was a very early innovator of the mobile platform, starting with an iPhone app in 2009 and now having an app for all platforms (inc Windows and Blackberry) – they report usage on mobile being 24% of all access to listings. In their Q4 financial report for 2011 they reported also that property was viewed on the mobile devices at the rate of 53 houses per second (3,180 per minute) in January. Now that is a stunning stat. For us in NZ we are currently seeing a rate of 24 houses viewed per minute. Allowing for the fact that the US population is 71 times that of NZ means that we are seeing activity at about half the rate of the US.

So as ever the rate of development overseas shows us how the the future is likely to look; and it looks like we will continue to see exponential growth in mobile usage across the various mobile devices, with NZ’s favourite real estate app only continuing to grow faster in usage and engagement.

 

The Realestate.co.nz mobile app is available for free from the Apple app store for iPhone or the Google Play store for Android devices.

 

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Mobile usage for finding property reaches a new milestone

Posted on: December 14th, 2011 | Filed in Featured, International, mobile

All of us here at Realestate.co.nz are delighted to see the mobile apps for both iPhone and Android blast through the 50,000 download mark this week.

It was just over a year ago when we launched the iPhone app – the first in NZ and the only app with GPS location based property search. A year later and we continue to be surprised and delighted by the uptake and usage which now approaches 14% of all visitor traffic to our listings from the mobile platform.

The appeal of this method of property discovery has been turbocharged in the past couple of months as the summer peak property season has arrived. The month of October saw the highest ever level of downloads with over 6,000 in the month, greatly assisted by the new Android version of the app (another first) in late September. The level of downloads continues with over 200 new downloads per day providing the users with the experience of discovering the convenience and addictive appeal of this app.

Not only are people downloading the app in ever increasing numbers but they are engaging with it more often. Over 2,000 visitors a day check out property for sale and rent whilst on the go – at the cafe, in front of the TV, at open homes.

The app is so comprehensive and so appealing. With the largest selection of listings by licensed agents, usage appeals to the serious property hunter keen to be better informed and in control of the property searching process. Over 90% of users are returning users and unlike the web which is very heavily focused to casual image based browsing the mobile app is all about property information and insight in the palm of your hand.

We have been interested to see just how keen kiwi’s are relative to other countries in regard to uptake and usage of property apps on the the smartphone. Instead of comparing downloads by country (which is tricky as not many other websites publish their data) we chose to use the ranking of the various apps in their respective iTunes app store. Clearly this just seeks to identify the iPhone platform, but this has been the consistent largest platform across all international markets for property apps.

We chose six countries to compare against NZ from Australia and the US / Canada as well as Europe. What we found was very interesting. The Realestate.co.nz property app is the 16th most popular free lifestyle app in NZ, and the 209th most popular free app. Out of interest if you exclude the free “gaming” apps from the rankings the Realestate.co.nz property app jumps up to be the 41st most popular free iPhone app in NZ.

By comparison to NZ; Sweden appears to have the most popular iPhone property app from Hemnet coming in as the 8th most popular free lifestyle app in Sweden, and the 104th most popular free app overall.

Next comes Australia where the Realestate.com.au app comes in as the 11th most popular free lifestyle app and the 127th most popular free app. That then places NZ in third slot amongst these 7 countries. Next comes Canada almost equal to NZ with their Realtor app ranked as the 16th most popular free lifestyle apps and 239th place overall for free apps in Canada. After these four come the the French app from Seloger, the US app from Zillow, and the UK app from Rightmove.

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Real estate mobile search comes to the Android smartphone

Posted on: October 9th, 2011 | Filed in Featured, mobile

The success of the Realestate.co.nz app for the iPhone has transformed the NZ real estate search experience. Every day thousands of eager property seekers fire up the iPhone app to checkout what property is for sale or rent right around where they are at that time. It’s the only property app in NZ for a smartphone that utilises the GPS capability to help you discover your favourite new home, from the most comprehensive database of listings for properties on the market.

All of these benefits has made the Realestate.co.nz app for the iPhone the mobile app of choice and is why over 40,000 downloads have been made through the iTunes app store in the past 11 months – with still over 100 new downloads every day.

The iPhone is unquestionably an innovative and highly appealing device, but globally the Android operating system is proving the leader with over 500,000 activations a day globally. In NZ the Android platform offers a wide range of smartphone options and this why it is so important for all these Android smartphone owners to have a mobile app for house hunting. To meet this need Realestate.co.nz is delighted to release an Android app to complement the iPhone app .

The functionality is very similar – again offering the only GPS enabled property search app in NZ for the comprehensive selection of property on the market. The app for both iPhone and Android draws on the enormous property database of Realestate.co.nz hosting as it does over 95% of all listed properties by licensed real estate agents.

The Android app is free and can be downloaded through the Android marketplace. Simple and easy to use and sure to swell the numbers of property seekers turning to their smartphone as well as their web browser to search for their next home.

 

3

Mobile property searching – the way of the future

Posted on: August 24th, 2011 | Filed in Featured, mobile, Online marketing

Homebuyers who search for property online are also turning to their mobile devices to locate properties for sale. This fact has been presented in the latest survey undertaken by Nielsen in the annual Nielsen Real Estate Market report.

As would be expected, the survey continues to show the trend of online being the most preferred and useful source of real estate information – over 95% of those surveyed stated that online was “useful or very useful”- this as compared to newspapers which dropping down from 42% to just 38% (compare this to earlier reports when more than half of respondents stated that newspapers were a useful or very useful source of property information).

The key insight though came when the survey respondents who had an internet enabled phone were asked if they had ever accessed a real estate website on the device? – 32% stated they had. This is significant as whilst there are dedicated real estate apps for the iPhone (the realestate.co.nz app) there are no mobile website versions of any NZ real estate website. People are clearly showing that they are keen to use their phone to access property information when they are out and about.

The report also discovered that real estate researchers online were much more likely than the national population to own an internet-enabled phone or device, with 48% compared to 34% of the population overall (Nielsen Consumer and Media Insights, Q2 2010 – Q1 2011).

What is significant is understanding the behaviour of accessing real estate information on a mobile device as compared to a laptop or desktop. Computers on your desk or on your lap are excellent for the “lean back” character of browsing property listings via ever more extensive galleries of high quality images. This is why real estate websites collectively attract a daily audience of over 134,000 unique browsers per day when only around 180 homes are sold each day in NZ.

Compare this with the behaviour of mobile users – they want and need information that is contextual to their location right now – what’s for sale around me? / what’s for rent here now? / When is the open home for that property 2 blocks down? / I need to contact the agent selling that home! / I want to look at the aerial image for this street to see what the backgarden looks like… and so on. People on mobiles accessing property information are not casually browsing, they are committed, active, passionate property searchers.

Back to the survey, other illuminating information provides some great insight into these mobile users.

Globally the Android platform for smartphones is now the #1 market leader with a 48% market share according to Canalys report of August 1st, additionally the platform dominates in 35 of the 56 countries surveyed. In NZ however whilst no published data is available industry opinion (web search analysis) would have the iPhone with a leadership of installed users with a ratio of close to 3 to 1 – far different to the US.

It is therefore very interesting to see from the Nielsen survey that 40% of those surveyed whilst searching for property online who had a smartphone claimed to have an Android device compared to 35% with an iPhone or iPad. This result surprised us and provided the impetus we needed to get an Android version of the Realestate.co.nz app (please be patient it is in development!).

Given the scale of adoption of the Realestate.co.nz iPhone app (over 35,000 downloads since launch in Nov last year) we were keen in the survey to see firstly how many mobile device owners had downloaded and used an app and also which app they had chosen to use.

The survey showed that of the 586 respondents that had a mobile internet enabled device 7% had downloaded an app and used that application to search for property / discover property. In terms of popularity – the clear winner is the Realestate.co.nz iPhone app – 49% people spontaneously identified that as their tools for property search.

The Nielsen Real Estate Market Report is based on a site-intercept survey on New Zealand real estate web sites conducted during May to June 2011 with a sample size of 1,219 respondents and a margin of error of 2.86 percent.
2

Real estate agents to embrace smartphones

Posted on: May 23rd, 2011 | Filed in Featured, mobile

Close to half of all agents polled in a recent survey said that they owned a smartphone with nearly 7 out of 10 of the remainder indicating that they would be acquiring one within the next year. These findings were part of a recent survey undertaken in partnership with 2degrees mobile amongst the real estate agents using Realestate.co.nz.

The survey was undertaken online with 216 completed surveys giving a margin of error of 4.2%.

Real estate agents were early adopters of mobile phones back in the 80′s and 90′s as their work environment certainly had them out and about more than many other professions. This adoption has continued with a clear imperative for all agents to have a mobile. The most active use of their mobile phone is to voice calls (40%) followed by texting (32%). It is interesting to note the preference of texting to handling emails on the mobile phone – just 13% indicating that they used their phone for this purpose.

At present the iPhone is the most popular type of smart phone for real estate agents with 24% of all those agents surveyed indicating that they owned the iPhone. Certainly the success of the Realestate.co.nz iPhone app would indicate the appeal of this smartphone to ensure that agents were able to be able to access the most comprehensive selection of property on the market. The adoption of Android at 17%; or put another way there is an Android user for ever 3 iPhone users, is higher than would be seen in the general population, and this signals a significant opportunity to ensure there is a Realestate.co.nz app for Android sometime soon.

As to the 54% of agents that do not as yet have a smartphone the message is clear that they will soon – 69% saying that they expect to buy one in the next 12 months with 40% indicating a purchase in the next 6 months. It would appear to be clear from these stats that a smartphone is now close to being by the end of this year a significant “must have” tool for all agents.

4

Property searching on mobile is a clear winner

Posted on: May 13th, 2011 | Filed in Buying / Selling a home, Featured, mobile, Website searching

I was very interested to read this week of the performance of the Trade Me iPhone app. In a very open manner they shared their data with the NBR. This naturally prompted me to examine the data from the Realestate.co.nz iPhone app after our first 5 months of operation.

As far as uptake is concerned in excess of 1 in every 10 iPhone owners has now downloaded the app, a total exceeding 25,000 downloads since we released the app in November. Every day we continue to see over 100 new users discover this great way to discovery property for sale right around them.

Trade Me’s app was launched at the same time, and in that time they have had over 110,000 downloads. Like Trade Me we had modest expectations of around 12,000 to 15,000 downloads within 6 months; so for us 25,000 for such a specialised app as compared to Trade Me’s app which covers such a diversity of content, is really encouraging.

This strong adoption of real estate listings search on the iPhone is reflective of a global trend which has seen over 1 million downloads of the UK real estate website Rightmove iPhone app and across in Australia over 180,000 for Realestate.com.au iPhone app.

The most developed market in terms of mobile usage for property search is the USA – there the #1 property portal Zillow.com reports not only downloads exceeding 3 million, but the level of engagement of buyers with property listings on the mobile platform is fast approaching a third of all viewings. For Realestate.co.nz we see that in the past month 10% of all property listings views are made via the iPhone app with a further 2% being on the mobile web platform across a number of mobile devices including Android and the iPad; this after just 6 months, shows how important the mobile platform is to the experience of looking for property to buy.

Another very interesting insight in the usage of the mobile device is the heavy usage at the weekend. Whereas the web usage has higher activity during the week the iPhone is clearly a weekend tool – part of the open home toolkit for a Saturday morning allowing active property hunters to drive around the areas checking out what is on the market or sitting in a cafe between open home visits.

In terms of usage the iPhone is clearly not a tool limited to the inner city suburbs, in the month of April over 90% of all listings of property on the iPhone were viewed by property hunters – that is a figure which has grown progressively over the past months as the penetration has gown and usage has extended to every corner of the country.

Clearly we see the iPhone app (and future Android app) becoming a critical platform to provide property hunters with a great experience to aid the process of finding that perfect property. We have new developments and functionality planned for the next few months and will keep improving the experience. With a dedicated audience of over 25,000 we are fully committed to this sector of the market.

 

8

Google exits map based property search service

Posted on: January 28th, 2011 | Filed in Featured, mobile, Technology, Website searching

google map search for real estate - Google SearchGoogle announced yesterday that it was ceasing the operation of its map based real estate search service. This service was introduced back in July 2009 as a complementary enhancement to their standard text search whereby listings for property for sale or rent were mapped based on addresses, supplied with listings by real estate agents and real estate websites (Realestate.co.nz fed content to Google for this service).

This is a significant decision by the world’s largest search engine.

In their official announcement they state that one of the factors in their decision was “the proliferation of excellent property-search tools on real estate websites“. They went on to say “We recognize that there might be better, more effective ways to help people find local real estate information than the current feature makes possible”.

Whilst I in no way doubt that the reasons they state are a true reflection of the circumstances that led then to this decision, I think there are other factors to consider.

I was always of the opinion that Google came at real estate search almost accidentally, especially in the early days. The concept was originated in Australia through the maps team under the leadership of the Lars Rasmussen. Their desire was to demonstrate their mastery of the mapping platform and locating property for sale and rent on these maps was appealing as data was readily available, with agents only too happy to collaborate (or put another way – the owner of the data would not object). The fundamental problem though, is that whilst mapping property is interesting and no doubt of value, it is not the intuitive first entry point of real estate search for buyers on the web.

Boutiques.com - Shop boutiques curated by style icons and you - Designer Shoes, Dresses, Handbags

The solution Google should have developed, in my opinion would have been using their image search platform. The primary consumer real estate search experience is really visual – rich imagery of properties for sale is so compelling. The map representation would have then been a natural complement to an image based search. In some ways Google recent foray with Boutiques demonstrated the true concept of a better approach to the real estate sector.

Another aspect of concern to Google could have been the view that an open free service for listing property opens up the potential for spammers to damage the user experience. Ed Freyfogle of Nestoria, who as an ex-Yahoo search expert is well positioned to comment, proposed this view that “The free model as demonstrated by Google means you’ll be spammed, get expired and fake listings, which are bad for users. And because you’re not earning any money, it’s hard to justify investing in the service”. There is no evidence that this did occur in NZ, but it was potentially a problem.

The existing specialist real estate websites like Realestate.co.nz that only accepts legitimate listings actively marketed by licensed real estate agents ensures that this eventuality cannot arise. A subscription fee model charged to real estate agents ensures the integrity of the content.

As to why Google will cease to provide this service. I suspect that the quoted reason being the changed structure of the Google Base to Google shopping data schema is the true reason – Google are a very highly advanced grouping of technologists.

In NZ the level of traffic from Google maps real estate search never eventuated to much. Realestate.co.nz fed 100% of content from day one and over the 19 months we received 220,000 session visits to Realestate.co.nz from the maps search – that is only 11,500 per month as compared to our total traffic being around 900,000 session visits per month. Consumers never easily found Google real estate map search, or even if they did, did not see it as that valuable.

Referring Sites - Google Analytics

The most likely people who did use it were real estate agents, who used it to better appreciate the total marketplace in their area. That is where it was of most value.iPhone map result example

The bottom line is that there is a significant place for mapping real estate listings – it is truly relevant in the context of mobile. When you are standing on a street corner, then a map representation of property near you for sale or rent is very compelling on your handheld mobile device – welcome to the smartphone apps from real estate portals!

Try it for yourself on the new Realestate.co.nz iPhone app.

3

Realestate iPhone app proves popular!

Posted on: December 7th, 2010 | Filed in Featured, mobile, Online marketing, Technology

blue bar chart growing - croppedThe first week with the app has been a blast! – we are delighted and so it seems are our audience, which feels great.

Since we launched 10 days ago we have had just over 7,000 downloads.

The usage so far is spectacular. Over the weekend we found that the level of traffic really picked up as expected (and as shared with us by US real estate sites with apps) as people used it to plan, navigate and collate their open home tours!

On Saturday we had the equivalent of 1 in 10 of our website visitors to listings on realestate.co.nz accessing property information via the app. During that period they viewed over 10,000 unique properties – that shows just how compelling the app is with people on the go, who want to be in touch with the property market.

Not only is the usage great, the feedback is awesome – thanks!

iTunes-1The iTunes store provides a platform for rating the app and we are again delighted to have had 20 written reviews and 25 ratings with an aggregate score of 4 out of 5 – plenty of people rate it 5 stars, there are some 4 stars and some 1 stars (its an open rating system!). The review section though does not allow the opportunity to comment back to posters, so here is some answers to questions asked.

FatCat Matt commented “Good app for the crazy ones buying houses like us. But needs to list the auctions date also!”

This is a good point and currently the app only highlights that the property is being sold by auction, tender or by negotiation. We will take this on board for future updates to the app.

ReaderG commented “Looks great but why not iPad too? Look forward to the upgrade”.

A good question and one that has been asked a few times. Firstly the app works well on the iPad – in the 2x mode you get great images (example below) and maps – the images are in the main configured for the iPhone 4 retina display so the quality on the iPad is pretty good.

iPad image example

Secondly we are waiting and reviewing the role of the iPad in real estate search process and are keen to get feedback. The principle of the iPhone app is to have a device which people can use “on the go” – whilst out and about at open homes and at the weekend. The integration of photos captured at properties as part of notes on the property is core to the principle of the app and this cannot be handled on the iPad – at the moment.

What I think this comment shows us is how valuable a search on a map is to the real estate search within the website of realestate.co.nz. We are currently working on this update for the new year on the website.

I can say that an iPad app is part of our plans for the near future as would be an Android app and Windows 7 mobile app.

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Mazone66 commented “Sadly doesn’t show over 50% of current listings. Disappointing”

The app is currently showing 45,296 listings of properties and building sections for sale as per the screen shot below (great feature this to be able to zoom right out to the whole of NZ).

iPhone addresses 6 Dec 2010On the site currently we have 49,314 homes for sale, 16,743 building sections for sale as well as 11,382 lifestyle properties. That means that the app has 58% of all the current licensed real estate listings we have on the website (we have a subscriber base of over 95% of all licensed real estate offices in NZ).

So Mazone66 is partly right in that we do not show all listings, but we do have more than 50%. There are 2 reasons for this lack of completeness. Firstly whilst we have close to 100% of all listing sent to us by real estate agents with an address, still a lot of agents request us not to publish the address, secondly address matching to map positioning is not an exact science (for more detailed explanation on these two issue please read my comment to a question on the earlier blog post on the launch of the iPhone app). Rest assured we are working really hard to improve the ratio of listings that are shown on the app – we want to provide the most comprehensive experience.

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Zoomzoom.mike commented “The only app that has ever asked me to go into general settings to enable location; the rest ask the questions within the app“.

We have double checked with our development team at Cactus Lab and they tell us that the code for the app for the iTunes App store does not have an option to ask for location or not to ask. The experience that has been noted here is not a function of how the app is built but may be a part of the set up of the phone on an individual basis. I am sorry Mike that this was the experience, the iTunes app store and the iPhone platform has many compliance requirements and we have to build to that, we want a seamless experience and we are sorry that you had this experience.

ZoomZoom mike also commented”Needs to have more specific search / filtering to make it truly personalized and useful. For example I only wanted to see 3 bedroom, 2 bathrooms, less than $400k”

The “refine” button allows for filtering of bedrooms, price and type of property. It does not provide filtering on bathrooms. We did in reviewing the spec for the app judge that removing the bathroom filter would not be a great loss in the interest of use of space. Clearly we may need to review this.

iPhone refine options Dec 2010

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appUser John commented “This is a great idea, done really well, except for the out of date realestate.co.nz database.

3 out of 4 houses I found with this app were actually no longer on the market. There are other houses around that don’t show up on the app. Also, it crashed 3 times in the 1day I was playing with it”

The issue in regard to the houses that are for sale not showing up on the app was answered earlier. In regard to property found on the app no longer being on the market. This is of concern to us. Our database of properties for sale (as well as rental, commercial properties, businesses and farms) is an integrated database with all of the customers of the website (real estate companies and agents).

We have over 1,000 real estate companies and offices sending us data everyday – sometime multiple times per day. In this way our database becomes a mirror of the database of the real estate offices and is very much live and dynamic with listings constantly being added and removed. These companies and offices want to ensure that they only advertise on our website or theirs properties that are truly on the market.

As to the experience of the app crashing, this is very frustrating. Naturally we have extensively tested the app however unlike a PC environment the mobile OS environment is susceptible to the connections with carriers and the nature of the computing platform. We are really keen to be able to investigate such crashes. To help us if you wouldn’t mind if you could go to this website and follow this instruction to log crashes – it does this through a sync feature with iTunes so you don’t need worry about remembering where you were on the app when it crashed!!