Does selling property online have a future, or is it just a flash in the proverbial pan, a fad like Hula Hoops and Rubik’s Cube? Two branches of the Digital Property Group, Prime Location and Property Finder, as well as Zoopla and Rightmove are, according to Nielsen, receiving huge numbers of visitors. Here are the numbers of unique visitors to those property portals in January 2011:
1. Rightmove – 3,599,000
2. Zoopla – 1,923,000
3. FindaProperty – 1,619,000
4. Prime Location – 1,048,000
That, in a 31-day period, is the tally of visitors looking to buy property online, to only four property websites. And that adds up to over eight million individuals that month … or around 258,000 individual visitors each day. But it’s not counting anybody’s return visits – Rightmove Estate Agents get forty million of those each month.
Of potential homebuyers, it’s now generally accepted, 93% are looking to find property online. And as far as marketing methods go, local newspapers’ property pages and estate agents’ windows have, well, gone. It’s the end of the offline estate agency era. But can internet estate agency keep growing in popularity? Judging by the latest figures from Rightmove, the answer is a definite ‘yes’.
Their latest interim performance report makes telling reading. In the three months to 30th April 2011 page impressions were up 15% on the same period in 2010 peaking on one day in particular to surpass the previous January 2011 record of 28.3 million daily page views. Searches via mobile devices were up an incredible 200%, assisted no doubt by its very popular Android ‘phone app which now boasts over 1 million software installation downloads since launch in 2009. Zoopla is enjoying growth too with an increase in visits to its still relatively new site of 11.9% this year compared to last, according to their own site information.
Prime Location research tells us that one in five Brits look at properties online for an average of four hours each. With 30 million of the UK’s 50 million adult population now surfing the net every day or almost every day (Office of National Statistics) this actually equates to around one in three regular internet users visiting property websites regularly.
As the population grows, not just in size but also dependence on the internet and mobile devices (it’s said that 50% of us now own a smartphone, for example) and despite the growth in the number of online estate agents, it seems that our natural addiction of finding property online still has a long way to go before reaching saturation point.
Done with paying high Estate Agents Fees you could join the increasing number of people choosing Internet Estate Agents eMoov.co.uk. eMoov will visit you to take full details of your home including high quality photographs and will then advertise it on all of the UK’s top 25 property websites including Rightmove. Selling fees start from just 99. What are you waiting for…?
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