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October 9, 2007
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 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]
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Comments
I'm not sure if it's leading or lagging, but it's definitely indicating something!
Posted by: guest at October 9, 2007 9:36 AM
I don't know about the other sites, but, for Property Shark, I suspect the drop is largely because they dropped much of the information that was previously available for free. A paid subscription is too costly for an amateur RE buff like me--us cheap freeloaders might not help pay the bills, but I'm sure we upped the stats a lot :-)
Posted by: Bob Marvin at October 9, 2007 9:49 AM
regardless of property shark, which is probably getting a lot of non-new york traffic, you can play around with the corcoran plot all by itself and see the summer dip in each year, you can go to 'max' and see the big real estate pause in 2004 as well..
but the lack of traffic currently vs last couple of years is remarkable. I don't think corcoran has lost ny market share?
If prices are holding, and I think they are, then it is perhaps because, new construction apart, there are so few new listings of co-ops & pre-wars & townhouses.
(Except in bed-stuy where there are a dozen brownstones for 600k- 700k a day on craigslist).
Posted by: guest at October 9, 2007 9:57 AM
I agree with 9:57 - I think both supply and demand are diminished which is holding prices steady. However, it is usually demand that drives this market (in NY I mean) and if demand is slowing, it's likely to eventually impact prices. I think brownstones might be an exception though b/c they can somewhat easily be held until the market goes back up (which its also likely to do, even if there is a dip) so sellers are less likely to list their places.
So in other words, supply is probably going to stay pretty even with demand. There might be a dip in demand that exceeds the dip in supply, but that will be short-lived in my opinion in brownstone brooklyn.
Posted by: guest at October 9, 2007 10:03 AM
According to the company who publishes this chart's website FAQ this looks like they are doing some serious guessing as well as using some (very vaguely defined) data sources. I'd honestly just ignore this information. Here's their explanation:
Answer
Alexa's search results are based on the data in our crawl of the Web. We combine what we have crawled with what we know about Web trends and behavior in order to present the most relevant results.
Posted by: guest at October 9, 2007 10:25 AM
I also looked at the Alexa website for info on the data but came away with a different view than 10:25 (broker). Look for yourself - interesting dataset with caveats that probably don't undermine the directional info.
http://www.alexa.com/site/help/traffic_learn_more
Posted by: guest at October 9, 2007 10:32 AM
It's true that Alexa's proprietary methods are bit mysterious, but Alexa is a commonly-accepted indicator of web traffic patterns.
Posted by: guest at October 9, 2007 10:42 AM
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.
Posted by: guest at October 9, 2007 10:57 AM
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%
Posted by: guest at October 9, 2007 11:54 AM
sorry, the first link is not working, but the second link with the graph is.
Posted by: guest at October 9, 2007 12:22 PM
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.
Posted by: guest at October 9, 2007 1:06 PM
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.
Posted by: guest at October 9, 2007 1:21 PM
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.
Posted by: Jeremy at October 9, 2007 2:24 PM
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.
Posted by: guest at October 9, 2007 7:50 PM
..careful bronwstoner could you be next?
Posted by: guest at October 10, 2007 7:42 AM
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