Real Estate & Mortgage Round-up: Zillow Gaining Recent Traction

I thought I would follow-up my previous January post covering the real estate January Effect with a February update.  As interest rates decline and we are entering prime home buying season (spring to early summer), we are seeing suprising resilience in the online real estate and mortgage category.  The BIGGEST surprise is that Zillow traffic has ramped significantly in the month of February.  This is very interesting.  Zillow has made a number of big announcements around acquiring more listings.  There is a high correlation between traffic, nationwide coverage, and the number of listings that a web site has.  Zillow recently broke through the 1 million listings barrier which is a major milestone for the company.  I wonder if the recent uptick in traffic has to do with increased refinance traffic.     

In Tier Two of online real estate, HomeGain appears to be on a tear growing reach nicely over the past three months.  This is largely due to HomeGain’s significant affiliate network and SEO investments.  BuyerLink is the growth engine for that business and is probably doing well in this environment.   

All players in the mortgage lead generation industry (BankRate, LendingTree, LowerMyBills) are seeing increased consumer demand for information around refinancing their mortgage ever since the Fed made its aggressive rate cuts in January.   Notice significant traffic increases in January which appear to have declined in February.  LowerMyBills and LendingTree seem to be experiencing steadier traffic levels.  It is clear that both LendingTree and LowerMyBills have reduced their ads spends significantly over the past six months.  I have been impressed by Experian swapping out LowerMyBills ads with ClassesUSA where appropriate in their banner advertising strategy.

Tier One Real Estate Reach: 

Tier One Real Estate Page Views:  

Notice how Zillow reach (or unique visitors) seems to be increasing but pageviews have been declining.  Interesting trend.  Maybe an indication of more people checking the value of their home versus spending increased time searching for homes for sale or neighborhood information.

Tier Two Real Estate Reach:

Tier Two Real Estate Page Views:

Mortgage Reach:   

Mortgage Page Views: 

Online Real Estate Traffic Off to the Races

Those of us who have worked in the online real estate industry are pretty familiar with the seasonality of the traffic patterns.  Generally, consumer traffic starts tapering off after school starts in September and then drops dramatically in November and December.  But for some reason, right after Christmas and New Year’s Day, traffic starts accelerating. 

Consumers start searching for homes online about three to six months before they get serious about buying or selling and contacting an agent. Consumers get back to work on January 2nd and are still shaking off the holiday blues by casually surfing and visiting real estate sites.   The first quarter of the year really determines what web site is going to be the most useful to both consumers and real estate professionals.

Though we are in the worst real estate downturn since the 80′s, consumers came back to real estate in a big way.  Take a look at the below graphs from Alexa (we need to make the assumption that trends in Alexa are accurate).  Nearly every real estate web site experienced a ncie uptick in traffic in the last week.  Realtor.com (owned by Move, Inc. and partnered with the National Association of Realtors – NAR) saw the most dramatic gains.  VERY SURPRISING.  I am not sure why Realtor.com moved so much more than anyone else.  I will need to do some research.  Anyone have an idea?

The below graph is the tier 1 of online real estate: Realtor.com, Zillow, Remax, Trulia, Homes.com

 

The below graph is my Tier 2 of online real estate – generally made of companies focused on marketing services, web sites or lead generation for agents.  Though it doesn’t show up on the above graph, Homes.com seems to be doing a very nice job in growing their online traffic.  Dominion, formerly known as Trader Publications, bought Homes.com in 2002.  Homes.com was a survivor of the dotcom boom and bust and was in difficult shape when they were acquired.  Since then, traffic has grown nicely.  I give Jamie Clymer a lot of credit for his work with Homes.com and Dominion’s real estate businesses.

 

We’ll keep watching the trends over the first quarter of 2008 to see how the online real estate industry plays out in 2008.