Property Buyers Online Research Continues to Rise

Property Buyers Online Research Continues to Rise

AUCKLAND, 24 August 2010 – The Nielsen Market Intelligence service which monitors audience traffic numbers for New Zealand websites shows the continued growth of online media when searching for property in New Zealand. The average daily unique browsers per month for the New Zealand real estate website category has risen by nearly 16% to almost 128,000 in June 2010 compared to June 2009. This was reported in figures taken from the fifth annual Nielsen Real Estate Market Report, sponsored by Realestate.co.nz.

Coincidentally, the total time spent on real estate websites has also increased by more than 14% during the same time period. The high growth rates in the number of unique browsers and in engagement on real estate websites show a trend that has been developing over many years. At the same time the report also monitors the overall property research behaviour of those people who are using the online medium to search for their next property.

This shows us that while increasing their use of various online options over time, many of these people are at the same time showing declines in the use of print resources. In particular, the largest decline, year on year, came from metropolitan newspapers, which now have half the reach they did in 2007. 4 out of 5 respondents now use a specialist real estate website to research property, while nearly two thirds are utilising company real estate sites.

Alistair Helm, CEO of Realestate.co.nz is interested in the seeming disconnect between where property advertising dollars are being spent and where buyers are researching:

“Around 90% of industry advertising goes on traditional media – specialist magazines as well as national and local newspapers. This is surprising given where buyers are researching.

2007 saw 50% of those surveyed using national newspapers; in 2008 it was 43%; last year it was 31% and now it’s just 25%. So in the space of three years the percentage of people has halved, which is startling.”

In fact, all printed media fell in popularity in the last year for real estate research, including magazines, printed windows displays, or even billboards. Meanwhile, online sources like search engines, company and specialist real estate websites all grew. (For details, see the graph on the following page.)

The growing dominance of specialist real estate websites as the preferred medium by active online property buyers has also been highlighted. Indeed, 80 percent of respondents said they had consulted a specialist real estate website in the past week, and 95 percent found them to be a useful option for real estate research.
Alistair Helm said the growing significance of specialist real estate websites as an indispensible tool for New Zealand property seekers mirrored international trends and could be attributed to the powerful functionality sites such as Realestate.co.nz were able to deliver to users.

“The research shows that in New Zealand real estate is quickly becoming an online game,” said Alistair. “Both buyers and sellers have become quite savvy at using the full suite of tools available online, and I predict we’ll see online research numbers swell even further in the coming years.”

When respondents were asked to rate the different types of media in terms of usefulness, specialist real estate websites lead the way and continue to be perceived as the most useful resource. These websites were rated as useful or very useful by 95 percent of respondents, consistent with the same score reached last year.

More analysis of the property market is available at www.Unconditional.co.nz.

Note: The Nielsen Real Estate Market Report is based on a site-intercept survey on New Zealand real estate websites conducted during April, May and June 2010 with a sample size of 1,225 respondents and margin of error of 2.86 percent.

About Realestate.co.nz
Realestate.co.nz is the official website of the New Zealand real estate industry, and provides the most comprehensive selection of listings across all categories of real estate. Realestate.co.nz lists more than 118,000 properties each year, representing more than 90 percent of all listings currently marketed by real estate professionals.

ENDS

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