Rightmove on top as portal wars continue to hot up

Rightmove has come out easily on top of the four major paid-for property portals, according to the latest statistics from independent analysts Hitwise and Comscore.

Both sets of figures for December show Rightmove achieving market share of between 59% and 77%, looking at a variety of criteria, including number of visits and time spent on the portals.

The other ‘top four’ portals, Propertyfinder, FindaProperty and Primelocation, split the remaining market share as they vie for second place.
 
Hannes Buhrmann, head of consumer websites at Rightmove, said: “We obviously spend a lot of time and money tracking and understanding home-mover behaviour. Familiarity with a website and ease of use appears to one of the main factors behind getting users to visit several times a month, stay on longer and visit more pages of property.

“Rightmove has been the largest property website for over eight years and now accounts for one in five of all visits to property websites.

“It has a massive and loyal user base that competitor sites are finding very hard to shift, in spite of increasing the number of properties on their sites by giving their service away for free.”

However, the portals war is hotting up: on Wednesday, Countrywide, the UK’s largest chain, announced that it had done a deal with Digital – publishers of Primelocation and FindaProperty – to list all its properties.

And this morning, free-to-list Globrix announced that Halifax is now marketing all of its properties on Globrix.

Halifax has 323 offices across the UK and covers both the sales and rental markets. This will mean a further 17,500 properties will be added and means that all of the larger estate agency chains now market their properties on Globrix.

This week, Rightmove also published the first in a series of results in a huge consumer survey. It found that only 9.2% of vendors thought this would be a good time to sell, and that seven out of ten consumers expect house prices to fall further. Two-thirds believe that it is now a buyers’ market but a number do not understand the current mortgage market, with one in six willing to borrow over four times salary.

The extraordinary survey elicited responses from over 28,000 people during a two-week period in January, with the only incentive being a chance to win one of 20 £25 M & S vouchers. Another sign of the times?