The website of Realestate.co.nz is one of the most popular means by which people in NZ and overseas search for properties for sale or rent. With over 30,000 sessions per day and around 400 new listings per day – it is not surprising that people undertake searches for a wide variety of properties or property types.
Each year we trawl through the search queries from amongst the more than 500,000 searches carried out over the past year to compile the top 10 lists and also to see what the trending searches have been.
As may might have expected the tone of searching over the past year has been somewhat down-beat with a large number of searches for recession related terms. The keyword of “mortgagee” was the single most searched term – over 40,000 times this word was searched in the past 12 months – that equates to one in every 13 searches.
The keyword also featured in a number of other search terms such as mortgagee auction, mortgagee sale as well as the more obtuse mortagee and morgagee! – totaling up all of the related mortgagee terms delivers a whapping 50,000 searches – 1 in 10 of all searches.
Paralleling the theme of recessionary searches the top 10 business related searches almost all have a focus to making money. Top search was “investment” with “do up” and “home and income” rounding out the top 10.
Contrasting the down-beat sentiment is the fact that within the top 10 are the lifestyle aspirations of property searchers seeking pools, waterfront living, character properties, villas and garages! – we do love our cars.
Keyword searches do provide an insight into the most heavily searched locations. Within this year’s list are some very interesting movements as compared to last year. The biggest rising location is the Christchurch beach suburb of Sumner – last year #354, this year rising to #45. Equally popular appears to be the Hauraki district town of Waihi, although outside of the top 10 suburb searches it did rise from #417 last year to #84 this year.
Queenstown continues to be the most searched location – up from #16 to #8. The other South Island centres of Christchurch and Wanaka faired well holding respective #24 and #25 positions. Big falls were recorded by Taupo falling from #21 to #39 and Devonport falling from #33 to #64.
Looking for emerging trends the biggest movers of the year had some interesting words – “grammar” (school) clearly shows an interest in the location proximity of home to school, “do up” and “home and income” demonstrate a continuing focus to saving money. As to why sleepout should the biggest rising search term? – that needs some investigation but going from #322 to #28 for the year is a big leap.
From biggest rises to biggest falls, the town of Paihia seems to have fallen out of favour – last year it was placed #115 – this year it barely scraped into the top 500, making it to #499. The Otago region similarly seems to have fallen from favour – down from #99 to #435.
Whilst we seem to have a growing sense of interest in garages – car ports are clearly not adequate for our needs, falling from #81 to #409!
Finally when it comes to the softer side of property searching we seem to have hardened up this year – two emotional keywords “sundrenched” and “cosy” seem to have been ignored and have fallen by over 300 places to languish in the bottom 100 of the top 500.
