Hitwise’s State of the Industry
Hitwise, the Internet traffic ranking service, just released its US Real Estate Report for February 2007. The report is based on a sample audience of 10 million US Internet users. It’s kind of like Nielsen numbers for the ‘Net.
Top 30 Real Estate Websites
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My observations:
- Move.com is on the march… Maybe Dustin Luther’s guerilla marketing tactics are paying off with some new eyeballs.
- MSN Real Estate is slipping. No surprise here. There’s been little to no development of this portal - certainly no new features to speak off. Looks like it’s getting left in the dust.
- HouseValues perking up? After a long slump HouseValues has made a significant jump in the rankings. I’ve been seeing a lot of HouseValues’ commercials on my local cable channels lately - I’m guessing this renewed advertising blitz is paying off in some traffic to the beleaguered destination.
Top Search Terms
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My observations:
- Zillow.com in the Top 10 means all its PR initiatives have paid off big time in huge brand awareness. This company has done little to no traditional marketing. That’s quite an achievement.
- Brand slugfest. Remax demolishes all other brands in searches. Coldwell Banker and Century21 are playing catchup.
Speaking of search, in a related post on Hitwise’s blog, Bill Tancer drills down into the connection between Google and Real Estate. Apparently, the Mountain View giant is responsible for 16% of the total traffic to real estate sites.
He also points out that Google Base is enjoying some success too - largely due to applications utilizing its database. Realogy’s 500,000+ listings are bound to help them out too (see Trulia Lands the Big One). According to Tancer, the following verticals are the most popular uses of Google Base.
- Employment 15.7%
- Real Estate 13.1%
- Auto Classifieds 11.9%
- Recipes: 7.1%
- Retail: 4.6%
- News: 3.4%
I’m still not entirely clear what Google’s end goal is with Google Base - but it’s clear its use for real estate is growing substantially.
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12 Comment(s)
6 Trackback(s)
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Katie | Mar 8, 2007 | Reply
Hi Joel,
I wonder if you re-ran that report where ApartmentRatings.com would rank. According to Alexa and Quantcast, our traffic is about the same as ForRent.com and ApartmentGuide.com
-Katie
John Schroeder | Mar 8, 2007 | Reply
RE/MAX has such a powerful brand. Our local, regional, and national advertising is right on the money. RIght now over 400 live MLS’s containing 92% of all listings in the country appear on RE/MAX.com.
Tyler Moxley | Mar 8, 2007 | Reply
I like the posting so we can see where people are going to find information on real estate, yet are these companies not in the business of providing information to consumers, but in the business of only selling leads to Realtors
James Nicholson | Mar 8, 2007 | Reply
Thanks for an informative post! What cracks me up about the list of search terms is how many people search for a specific URL like realtor.com or zillow.com, rather than going to the URL directly. My Mom does this all the time and it drives me nuts.
matt | Mar 8, 2007 | Reply
“Brand slugfest. Remax demolishes all other brands in searches. Coldwell Banker and Century21 are playing catchup.”
Remax might be demolishing on a large scale but real estate is local…when I was in the eastbay (Castro Valley), Prudential have more of a presence. In San Francisco you see zephyr and more boutique brokerages. I agree that you see more REmax commercials, which makes me think of the “Mcdonalds of real estate” (somebody told me that a while ago, I forget who though), but locally it more about for sale signs, newspapers, and word of mouth
housereview | Mar 9, 2007 | Reply
Re: Google’s end goal. It’s clearly stated - organizing the world’s information.
They want to gather and organize everything they can. Revenues will be generated through user friendly advertising.
Christian Sterner | Mar 9, 2007 | Reply
Hey Joel,
Out of the claimed 16% of real estate site traffic being driven by Google, how much of that is from Base, and-more importantly-from Google Ad Words?
John | Mar 9, 2007 | Reply
Thanks for sharing Joel, it’s too bad that Hitwise data is highly inaccurate. Hitwise is the poor man’s comScore…
Incredible Agent | Mar 9, 2007 | Reply
The most impressive stat on there is from Zillow. They are just over 1 year old and people are already searching for them at that level. They have an incredible PR machine going for them. Very impressive.
It would be an interesting number to see the correlation between marketing dollars spent and traffic generated.I know RE/MAX has spent a lot of dough on marketing last year and I don’t know if that turned into what they were expecting for traffic. I would expect them to be much higher on that list for the amount of money they spent. Especially compared to those above them.
Also, where’s RealEstate.com on this list? Are you telling me Service Magic(Contractors?) is on the list but RealEstate.com isn’t? That makes me question the accuracy a bit. I also don’t think RealtyTrac numbers are accurate. According to Alexa, they get killed by Zillow.com, HomeGain.com, Rent.com, etc.
Whenever I see numbers like this, I get a little quezy. It makes me think twice about their credibility. A good gauge none-the-less.
john harper | Mar 10, 2007 | Reply
Dustin Luther is up to something with LinkedIn - I’m interested to see how he is going to leverage it for Move.com
Allen Shannon | Mar 21, 2007 | Reply
Does anyone know what these stats are based from? IIS logs, Analytics, etc? Can anyone sign up?
mike | Nov 10, 2007 | Reply
i have a idea that would change the way we would all buy and sell realestate its a great idea but dont have the capital or the know how on where to start