The month of July is historically one of the quiet periods of the year in terms of the property market – the most active months are usually February / March and October / November. Conventional wisdom however seems to be overlooked this year as activity in terms of online searching for property is attaining new record levels.
In July just short of 4,500,000 individual sessions were recorded across the top 10 real estate websites – a staggering 1.2 million hours being consumed by property seekers browsing real estate websites – this being just the time spent by NZ’ers – there are many thousands of international searchers of NZ property as well.
The chart below tracks the total sessions undertaken on the top 10 websites as measured by Nielsen Online each month and shows the relative level of activity for 2009 (green bars) as measured against 2008 and 2007.
In addition to the upturn in activity seen this year, what can also be clearly seen is the lack of relative growth between 2007 and 2008. Given the every greater acceptance and usage of the web as the primary means of searching for property there would be an expectation to see a natural annual increase. The level of activity in 2008 in some months barely surpassed 2007 – more than likely a consequence of a very subdued property market and the impact on consumer sentiment.
This representation of data is very likely to demonstrate that the web and the traffic to the websites for property is becoming a valuable lead indicator of market demand.
In order to be able to see a better representation of truer demand by property seekers the chart below tracks the same data, but rather than show actual activity it indexes the weekly level of activity across the 10 websites. This method helps in removing the factor of natural organic growth of web searching, to better show property market demand.
This chart which uses data right up to this week does highlight the pick up in property searching since the low in June which on an index basis matched the relative position back in June 2007. Subsequently the level of activity is increasing at a far faster rate than 2 years ago which was as you will recall, a time when the property market was considerably more active than it is today in terms of sales.
Measured against last year the level of property searching this year is much stronger, and already experiencing an early spring pick up which was never really seen this time last year when global and local economic sentiment was dropping to all time lows and before interest rates really started to fall.
