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.
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7 users responded in this post
Thanks for the information and research. I’m sure the cycle will come back and there will be another boom so to speak online. It’s interesting how there are now so many online companies that allow you to see home prices, sales, market time, school info, demographics and so on. There will be some consolidation I’m sure but I still think that online is the key to any industry, and certainly the real estate market.
Thanks for the dynamic figures. It is great to see how the online real estate trends are working out. It seemed to me as I was reading your report that more real estate related websites are emerging on the web everyday; maybe the use has spread out taking some users from the bigger sites. I’ll keep watching to see…
I think maybe we’re all a little ahead of ourselves. I’m guessing all the traffic is just bloggers visiting other bloggers.
My clients. for the most part, are not as into the internet as we think they are. For an example, 37signals.com has amazing tools that I use to track my clients. One of the tools is BackPackit. I LOVE this service. It gives me a place to put everything related to a transaction together in one place, and I can share it with the client so they have up-to-the-second info on their listing/sale. The sharing part is simple…I email them a link – that’s it. Funny thing is, out of 20 or so clients I have set this up for, only ONE has actually used it. WTF? I pitch this pretty heavy in my presentation, and even demo it on my laptop. They get excited, and say how great it is, but never end up using it.
My over-worded point is, we’re in this internet game day in and day out. We’re very current with trends and practices, but sadly, our clients (generalization) are not. So maybe as the next generation grows, we’ll see better stats, and won’t be sharing as much of the pie. My 12 year old niece has far superior internet skills than the majority of people I currently work with.
Nice summary Shaun. That’s why I think we’ll see the size of the pie grow in the future. We haven’t really tapped into the “internet generation” yet. There will be another boom when that happens.
Maybe real estate is local, maybe the big national web sites will lose traction and local web sites will gain.
oh, I really like your post.
Interesting post. The decline in web traffic is in line with the decline in sales. I suspect that when the market improves, so will the web traffic.