Comprehensive new research – Nielsen annual survey

You would have had to have had your head firmly buried in the sand not to appreciate how much the web is transforming the real estate industry – most significantly in terms of marketing.

From the latest Nielsen research comes the startling fact that in the past week 78% of buyers used the web to search property as compared to less than a third using main metropolitan newspapers.

Added to that is the fact that in the last 12 months web usage has gone up 9 points whereas newspapers have fallen a staggering 12 points to just 31%.

In the coming 12 months 74% of buyers expect they will use the web the same or more; as against just 25% of buyers who feel they will use newspapers the same or more in the future.

Full details of this analysis and details of how long property seekers spend searching online and offline, as well as what property seekers want to find out about property listings is contained in this summary of the Nielsen Real Estate Market report for 2009 of which realestate.co.nz is the primary sponsor.

View and download the presentation here and include slides in your sales presenters and thereby demonstrate to vendors why your focus is more and more towards online marketing.

October 01 2009 | Research | No Comments »

Website Business Report – March 2009

The real estate market enjoyed a strong performance in March with total sales of 6,694 a 29% increase over March 2008 – certainly not of the volumes seen during the heady days of 2005 -2007, but certainly enough to stimulate some optimism that we could be past the bottom in terms of sales volumes.

In the online world the level of activity continues to grow and grow. The latest statistics from research in the USA for the latter half of 2008 shows that 94% of all property buyers aged 25 to 44 used the web as part of the buying process! The update for the NZ data will be released in late June of this year and is likely to show similar high levels.

In terms of visitor numbers for the period covering February and March total visitor sessions across all real estate websites (as measured by Nielsen) consistently exceeded 1 million per week, up 21% on the prior year.

Realestate.co.nz continues to outperform the market with a significant 377,939 Unique Browsers in March an increase of 42%; more than twice that of our competitor and over 4 times the market growth.

The full report can be downloaded here

April 20 2009 | Market stats and Nielsen Online stats and Special offers and Web facts | No Comments »