Rightmove, which is due to announce its results on Friday after a 71% net profit margin last year, has announced record traffic in January, propelling it to seventh place in the chart of most page-viewed websites in the UK.
It was beaten only by Google, Facebook, eBay, YouTube, Amazon and Yahoo, and even succeeded in beating BBC News which came eighth.
The next highest placed property website, according to Experian Hitwize, was Zoopla at 83, followed by FindaProperty at 111 and Primelocation at 193.
Rightmove pulled off the feat after clocking up nearly 800 million page views in January.
The 795,280,583 page views recorded on Rightmove’s website equated to more than one million pages of property being viewed every hour during the first month of 2012, and broke the previous high for pages viewed set in May 2011.
The site had 13 million unique visitors last month, another record.
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Dear Fellow agents.
If one adds up all the "unique visitors" for all of the sites as reported by Comscore, Neilsen etc for the past 12 months it comes to a total greater than the world population!
Now I am sure there are visits to Rightmove from outside the UK; the Gadafi family, the Hussains, any one with cash from Greece, but the huge huge claimed numbers can only be coming from outside our known Universe.
Taking just the 13,000,000 claimed unique visitors in this story. Rightmove are either;
Sending every single agency branch 962 new applicants each month, (236 for every negotiator and secretary)
Sending half the agents 1925 new applicants each month.
Or they are simply not sending these genuine unique visitors through to the agents.
If you haven't had 962 applicants through from Rightmove you ought to be wondering why not.
Anyone who makes these ridiculous claims for unique visitors ought to be hauled before the fraud office and asked to prove or explain how or why they honesty think that Alien Life forms are visiting UK property portals.
The numbers are so stupidly exaggerated that someone is either so innocently stupid they should be removed from society for their own protection or so brazenly wrong that they should be investigated by the authorities.
Traditional KPIs for our industry indicate there ought to be about 2,000,000 unique applicants looking to buy and 1,200,000 looking to rent at any one time. That is a total of less than 7,000,000 even if my KPIs are 100% wrong.
If I claimed my manhood to be a full 1 metre long everyone would laugh but you lot are paying well over the odds on the claim that the RM figures are 6 1/2 times bigger than common sense says they are.
Unique visitors aren't necessarily unique and are often measured using cookies. So, if I check Rightmove at work, look at it on the PC at home, check something on the wife's laptop and scan using my iPhone, I could be classed as 4 unique visitors. Further, if I use a different browser on the same machine I can register as even more unique visitors as cookies are usually browser specific.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unique_user
Monday not a lot if the report is to be believed, I am guessing its not only people in the UK that look at Rightmove so perhaps this explains the huge number of unique visitiors?
Exactly, if all agents stopped looking at their competitors' properties on RM, what would happen to the traffic statistics?
PoTW. People looking on Rightmove are not the consumer. They are the product.
The consumers are agents who pay for the leads and see fee rise after fee rise after fee rise.
20 to 30 thousand estate agents all looking at Rightmove all day?
I wonder where they get the stats from. 13 million unique visitors. Hmmm, wonder how many people in this country have internet access. 30 million?
Nearly half the people with internet access go to a property portal? I find that hard to believe.
And to Rip off Rightmove who wrote ... 'Will the OFT act now? They have all the facts. Do they have the balls? The consumer is paying.'
What on earth has their fees got to do with the OFT. Nothing unfair about charging whatever they can get their customers to pay. Have you got the balls to resist their charges and go elsewhere?
I don't see how the consumer is paying. EA fees - in percentage terms - have not gone up. Overall fees increase in line with property prices so have gone up massively over the last 13 years so, in that sense, consumers are paying. But it is estate agents making less profit than they otherwise would who are really paying - possibly through the nose.
Rip off Rightmove
I would turn that on its head and personally say that Rightmove provides much better leads than DPG, even Zoopla give us better leads then DPG, but then its going to be different for every agent I imagine.
If Rightmove aren't providing you value for your money, maybe you should leave them.
Can we read more in to this? Are more people looking to buy or is it tenants looking to rent who are pushing RMs numbers. I'd like to know the split of 'rent' vs 'buy' over the last 12 or so months.
I am glad Ros has highlighted their obscene margin. It will be even higher in the full year results.
Will the OFT act now? They have all the facts. Do they have the balls? The consumer is paying.
Compared to DPG, the quality of RM's leads is dire. Do some analysis of your own, you'll see. How many of RM's "leads" requesting viewings go to voicemail and are never heard from?
We get approx five times the proportion of non-responsive leads from RM over DPG. RM's cost per real lead is a joke.
Ok anyone have any ideas on a fee structue that is acceptable to agents. Now be careful you can get called some nasty names for trying to get a better deal for the customer. :0)
71% NET PROFIT - Wonderful News - Pass some of it back to your loyal agents and regulate your fee scale so everyone pays the same!!!