Top 10 Australian Property Portals – February

In January we saw that realestate.com.au was the dominant property portal and, to no ones surprise, the position hasn’t changed in February. realestate.com.au continues to dominate, however traffic dropped marginally due primarily to the slightly shorter month. Five new sites made it onto the various lists in February: allhomes.com.au, the vertical search engine nestoria.com.au, and three franchise group sites – ljhooker.com.au, century21.com.au and raywhite.com.au.

All numbers are prepared using Google Ad Planner’s February 2012 numbers.

Traffic

realestate.com.au continues to dominate the Australian market with as many unique users as the next 6 portals combined.  Traffic did drop marginally from 3.8m unique users in January however this is probably more to do with a shorter month and some seasonality.  Interestingly domain.com.au increased its relative share of traffic from 52% of realestate.com.au’s traffic to 59%.

Allhomes.com.au and ljhooker.com.au have been added to the list for the first time.

Source: Google Ad Planner, February 2012

When looking at total visits to the sites, realestate.com.au is the clear leader with more visits than the next 9 combined (actually more than the next 16 combined).  The niche ACT (Australian Capital Territory) site, allhomes.com.au jumps into third place while raywhite.com.au, a franchise group site, is added to the list in 10th place.

Source: Google Ad Planner, February 2012

Finally, when looking at traffic, we look at the frequency of visit or how many times per month the average user visits the site. realestate.com.au and allhomes.com.au are neck and neck with people visiting the site around 5.5 times each month.  This shows that market dominance (allhomes.com.au dominates in the relatively small ACT area) can drive return visits and strong loyalty.  REIWA, in Western Australia also does well.  One site that dropped off the top 10 list was the recently listed onthehouse.com.au.

Source: Google Ad Planner, February 2012

Engagement

The second measure of success is the level of engagement a site has with its users.  This is best viewed through page impression, average page impressions per visit and average session duration.

Not surprisingly, the market leading realestate.com.au dominates on the page impressions measure.  Both allhomes.com.au and domain.com.au do well however realestate.com.au has more page impressions than the next 16 sites combined.  Both realestate.com.au and domain.com.au had a slight decrease in page impressions from January.

Source: Google Ad Planner, February 2012

When looking at page impressions per visit, realestate.com.au is knocked off first place and rather handsomely so.  Allhomes.com.au had a whopping 25 pages per visit, well ahead of realestate.com.au and domain.com.au.  This indicates that while traffic isn’t stella to the allhomes.com.au site, the quality of the traffic is high with the visitors clearly in search mode.  Both Nestoria Australia and Century 21, the franchise group site, make it into the top 10 for engagement – admitted both on relatively small visit numbers.

Source: Google Ad Planner, February 2012