It only makes sense with all the local real estate agents getting up to speed with serious websites full of local info, people go where the best info is. In Tucson I think agents are becoming more up to speed with the internet. Other areas are way more advanced especially Phoenix. R.com isn’t going to impress anyone anymore without a serious upgrade.
I wonder if that has anything to do with Move.com – maybe they’re sending the traffic that way? I’d be interested in finding out when they combined. I just looked at Move.com’s alexa rankings and it looks like around the time Realtor.com started losing traffic, Move.com gained some but it looks like they’ve lost a lot more than move.com has gained.
Eric, I think what Josh meant is: If Realtor.com is losing all this traffic, to where is the lost traffic going? Are people just not searching for properties any more (as unlikely as that might sound), or are there similarly growing graphs for one or more other real estate search sites?
The above graph alone shows that Realtor.com appears to be losing traffic volume, but it does not actually show that it is losing “market share” unless you also show that someone else is picking up the traffic that Realtor.com is losing. (It seems likely that someone is, unless we think that perhaps people just aren’t searching for properties as much these days. Just pointing out that you haven’t actually shown it.
Good points. I think we can safely assume that overall consumer searching online isn’t down 80% . This means that someone is picking up the share. Here’s a graph showing the traffic comparison between r.com, zillow, & trulia. As you can see, trulia & zillow have both increased their traffic moderately while r is dropping. I believe that agent sites are also taking a good chunk – but I don’t have any data to point to that.
Looks like Zillow’s falling as (relative) much as is Realtor.com, while Trulia may be growing, but only slightly if that…
I agree that it seems unlikely that property-search activity is simply down by that much, but this only makes that less clear. You may well be right, that more individual agent/broker sites are picking up the run-off, or maybe other sites like Yahoo! Real Estate or [m]any of the new ones cropping up every week, or…
I definitely don’t think less people are searching for properties on line – more than likely the exact opposite as Eric pointed out – 80% and climbing.
I think it’s a combination of new real estate sites popping up and real estate agents getting more web savvy. Either way, I’d like to have Realtor.com’s traffic!!!!
I bet part of it is the fact that with the Real Estate correction there are many Realtors who have cut Realtor.com from their budget. Much of Realtor.com traffic is from Realtors as well as consumers. RE/MAX has also put a dent is their market share.
Interesting stuff. How much of this do you think is due to the Real Estate slowdown in the USA. I would be interested to compare those stats against UK sites such as primelocation.co.uk and rightmove.co.uk
Do you think that realtor.com’s new beta web 2.0 site will help regain the traffic they have lost? I have pocked around on it a bit and if consumers take to the wikis it could really become a hit. With that said it is so much different in functionality that they could loose their die hard visitors. I often wonder if it is a good move for the larger sites to make a complete make over. A example is propeller.com I use to love their old site but now almost never go on it. Looks cheesey and goofy to me now. What is your take on this?
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