A 30,000-Foot Look at Real Estate Traffic Online

I’ve been out on the road for a couple weeks – much of that time without a web connection and no phone at all. That’s given me a lot of time to think, and one of those thoughts was on the general real estate market online.

Since I’ve been back I see that Hitwise has released it’s report, and that a few people have weighed in on the findings. My question in particular is, how much total traffic is there, and are we reaching a cap? Or, are we all starting to dip into the same pool?

Matt, from Hitwise, was kind enough to give me some historical real estate numbers comparing the first 5 months of 2007 to the first 5 months of 2006. Their numbers tell us that there has been a decrease in percentage of activity in the real estate sector. Here are the numbers:

DATE —– Market Share
January, 2007 —– 0.46%
February, 2007 —– 0.44%
March, 2007 —– 0.45%
April, 2007 —– 0.47%
May, 2007 —– 0.45%
Average Market Share % —– 2.27%

DATE Market Share
January, 2006 —– 0.48%
February, 2006 —– 0.48%
March, 2006 —– 0.50%
April, 2006 —– 0.49%
May, 2006 —– 0.49%
Average Market Share % 2.44%

2007 vs 2006 -7%

More Numbers
I did a quick run through of the numbers on 3 real estate 1.0 companies (Realtor.com, RealtyTrac.com and Homegain.com), and 2 of the new real estate 2.0 companies with big numbers (Zillow.com and Trulia.com). None of the stat tracking services are very accurate, but as an aggregate they can tell you something interesting.

The results from Alexa, Compete and Google Trends all show a plateauing or decrease in the amount of traffic to these top real estate websites.

Alexa 1-year results:

Compete.com results:

Google Trends results (Google gives no way to do 1-year, so this is just 2006):

However, if we look at each individually on Quantcast, we see a different story. There seems to be an upwards trend on traffic for all but

Quantcast results:
(in the following order: Realtor.com, Zillow.com, RealtyTrac.com, Homegain.com, Trulia.com)

Final Thoughts
A lower percentage in total market share, as given by hitwise, doesn’t necessarily mean that there are fewer visitors to real estate web sites – we could all be getting less of the overall pie. Trending data from Alexa and Compete both tend to trend down or to have flattened out, yet Quantcast shows us some upward trending for specific properties.

The only conclusion that I can reach is that there is no major growth. At the moment, it looks like we’re all fighting over the same people, but I think that could be misleading. In the end, internet growth as a whole in the US continues. So, though we might be plateaued at the moment, the numbers will grow again. Market conditions play a role here as well, and there might very well be a correlation between the offline market and online traffic.