I was doing research for the release of an upcoming white paper on consumer property search. After going through rounds of debates about which reporting source is most accurate in representing consumer traffic, I concluded that none of them are very accurate, but all relatively symbolic of accurate traffic. Hence, I like to use Compete.com for my research because they dynamically build the graphs.
What to my surprise did I see this morning? Nothing short of shock to learn that realestate.yahoo.com has passed realtor.com in search engine traffic according to Compete.com. I have no idea why realtor.com has tanked in traffic – perhaps it is an error. But nevertheless, here are the results – debate them as you may. The report also shows that zillow is a nose in front of trulia, and cyberhomes is on the rise.
If you are looking at your online advertising plan, or listing syndication plan, this data is an important indicator of where consumer traffic is focused. Looking at the total number of visitors as a ratio of to transactions in the US, it is obvious that consumers are visiting multiple third party websites in addition to local agent and broker sites to research property information.
