Real Estate Buyers Clicking Less and Less in '07
An insightful reader alerted us to the steep decline in traffic that some of the major real estate web sites have been experiencing over the past year. It’s also interesting to note (though hard to see on this particular graph) that none of the sites had much of a post-Labor Day pop as you would…
An insightful reader alerted us to the steep decline in traffic that some of the major real estate web sites have been experiencing over the past year. It’s also interesting to note (though hard to see on this particular graph) that none of the sites had much of a post-Labor Day pop as you would expect. For what’s it’s worth, our traffic was flat in September as well, though last week was the biggest week we’d had in months. How good a leading indicator do you think these stats are?
Real Estate Web Traffic Graph [Alexa]
..careful bronwstoner could you be next?
The websites might be less “new and exciting” as Jeremy says, but so might be real estate as a spectator sport. It was fun during the bubble but now the RE news is too dour to be entertaining.
Even watching reruns of HGTV shows become painful, watching somebody buy an oversized suburban house at top-of-market prices a couple years ago, in some sprawling subdivision in the South or Midwest. Knowing the house is now worth 30% less than when the episode was filmed.
It could just be that the “new and exciting” quality of all these real estate websites is wearing off, and a normal pace is being settled into.
10:32 AM poster here – looked further at Alexa data. I take back what I wrote before after looking at the same data for nyc.gov (should be stable or growing slightly) and nytimes.com (should be growing especially after making site all free access). Both nyc.gov & nytimes.com appear under Alexa to have shrinking readership. Perhaps Alexa’s userbase grew in the last year as all these stats are given as percent of overall userbase.
Some contracts are still getting signed but more and more buyers are on the sidelines, fed up with these astronomical prices. Hence the click dip.
sorry, the first link is not working, but the second link with the graph is.
If you look at compete.com, you can see that we are actually positive in the traffic to the websites outlined above.
See http://siteanalytics.compete.com/elliman.com+corcoran.com+streeteasy.com+propertyshark.com?metric=uv‘
and http://home.compete.com.edgesuite.net/elliman.com+corcoran.com+streeteasy.com+propertyshark.com_uv.png
August 06 – August 07
elliman.com Up 78.8%
corcoran.com up 42.6%
streeteasy.com up% 730.4%
propertyshark.com up 6.1%
alexa is pretty crap and their absolute “reach” or “rank” numbers are, for some sites, completely wrong.
BUT they show month to year trends quite well enough for this exercise – especially when the trend is repeated for multiple sites with a similar audience. Look at the 3yr graph for brownharrisstevens .. same fall off.
It’s true that Alexa’s proprietary methods are bit mysterious, but Alexa is a commonly-accepted indicator of web traffic patterns.