It's going to be a key week for the two largest property portals - on Thursday Zoopla will produce its first trading figures since the launch of OnTheMarket while Rightmove has today claimed it saw its busiest ever month in January.
Rightmove claims visits across all platforms hit 100 million for the first time ever last month, an uplift of 12 per cent on January 2014.
Page views - which it claims are the best indicator of activity on the site - surpassed 1.5 billion for the first time ever meaning home hunters are getting through over 1,000 pages every two seconds it says.
Email and phone enquiries to agents on Rightmove hit 4.3 million for the first time, equating to around 100 enquiries every minute.
The fact that activity increased as the month progressed - for example our busiest days across all of our platforms were Sunday 25 and Monday 26 January - points to an extremely busy next few weeks for Rightmove agents as this surge in property searching leads to even more requests for viewings and valuations says Miles Shipside, Rightmove's commercial director.
Meanwhile sources suggest Zoopla will be announcing a record volume of traffic when it makes a formal statement on Thursday.
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Comments
I wonder how it will look next year, they are both cornering the marketing meaning if you're not listed you're not likely to get seen. I'm curious if the stats really mean more enquirers were made for agents..
@Guest (PeeBee)
Quite correct. The OTM agents are not putting anywhere near enough 'bang' into promoting the site - just look at their newspaper ads - the papers that their local customers see EVERY week. Look at the 'national' Sunday papers - where the 'big boy' OTM members advertise - one needs a magnifying glass to see the OTM logo and I have been looking for it!
It all seems very half-hearted.
OTM isn't getting the traction. Its looking like propertylive3 already
Property Portals can only be judged in their effectiveness on the number of 'Hard Enquiries' they generate for the estate agents who pay the subscription fees. Claims of record numbers of Page Views, Site Visits or clicks etcs are meaningless unless it results in specific enquiries from motivated prospects for the agent concerned. Rightmove, Zoopla, On The Market etc ...........Im sure will be judged on that alone.
Well no wonder, they need to increase prices to appease the shareholders before the majority of OTM agents drop them for good!
This is surely the most expected, least surprising news ever, isn't it! If RM don't "make a bit of hay" now, with their er, prime competition having had the rug pulled from under them, they surely never will..........