A number of recent search queries on this blog have originated from the question “what are the latest numbers for web traffic on real estate websites?” – so in a spirit of openness and transparency, here are the latest stats for August from Nielsen Online.
In the month of August a total of 1,489,294 unique browsers visited at least one of the real estate website tracked by Nielsen during the month. That is up 17% on a year ago and now represents the highest ever month. The previous record was just last month with 1,415,803. As can be seen from the chart below the rise of real estate web traffic has been steady and progressive over the past 4 year when back then 500,000 unique browsers was a record.
Whilst the traffic may have grown 3 fold over the past 4 years the sales and buyer demand has not grown anything like that level. This demonstrates firstly the growing dominance of the web as the most utilised and valued source of real estate information, but also that online browsing of real estate listings - and especially those of appealing lifestyle property is a very active kiwi pastime!
In terms of which websites are being viewed the table below charts the top 10 websites on the same metric of total unique browsers in the month of August 2009.
What is noticable from the table is the growing polarisation of audience – those property portals (realestate.co.nz and trade me property) are stretching the lead. This is a function of the appeal of their respective offerings – in the case of realestate.co.nz, the most comprehensive content and in the case of trade me property, private sellers.
A final metric of the market for online real estate websites is the relative growth on a year-on-year basis. The total audience of all real estate websites is up 17% – indiviudally the growth of individual website from within the top 10 in most cases exceeds that growth further demonstrating the polarisation to the major top sites.
Naturally we are delighted to see that realestate.co.nz is up a staggering 50% in a year delivering close to 400,000 unique browsers in the month of keen property searchers both here in NZ and from overseas.
August was a stellar month on the sales front so it is no surprise that the websites have been busy. I expect that REINZ sales volume for August will be up at least 60% when compared with August 2008 which was truly a shocking month – if I remember correctly it was one of the worst months in the history of the REINZ statistics.
September has been just as busy so far – if only we could convince more people to sell. Almost all of our recent sales have resulted from multiple offer scenarios and our buyer database is growing rapidly.
I would not be surprised if the August statistics indicate a new record NZ median house price and if that doesn’t happen in August it will happen at some point this side of Christmas.
Speaking of the festive season and allowing for Labour weekend there are really only 13 effective weekends left to get your house sold before Christmas!