To date we have been looking at the mature major markets of the UK, Australia and the US. However, it is now time to look at the emerging market of India. Every time I talk to someone in this market they are claiming to be the market leader. Clearly not everyone is the market leader so it makes sense to get behind the claims and to see how the various sites are going.
Firstly, the market is very fragmented with us identifying over 40 different portals but due to lack of data, being able to only track around 20. Even so, it appears that the four players are pulling away from the pack – magicbricks.com, 99acres.com, indiaproperty.com and makaan.com.
All numbers are prepared using Google Ad Planner’s February 2012 numbers.
Traffic
Magicbricks and 99acres are basically the same size and capture significantly more (around 2.5 x) the unique users of the number 3 and 4 players indiaproperty.com and makaan.com. The rankings quickly fall away after that with there being a bunch of smaller sites with less than 200k UV’s per month.
UV (users) (m) | |
magicbricks.com | 0.84 |
99acres.com | 0.83 |
indiaproperty.com | 0.38 |
makaan.com | 0.35 |
commonfloor.com | 0.22 |
property.sulekha.com | 0.14 |
propertywalla.com | 0.12 |
allcheckdeals.com | 0.12 |
realestateindia.com | 0.11 |
indianrealestateforum.com | 0.11 |
Source: Google Ad Planner, February 2012
The same four sites also have the most visits. On this measure 99acres and magicbricks.com have changed places but still have around 50% of the visits to the top 10 sites between them. The top 4 account for 70% of visits to the top 10 sites. However, this market is clearly not as concentrated as the UK or Australian markets where the market leader has over 50% of all visits.
Visits (m) | % Visits | |
99acres.com | 1.90 | 27.8% |
magicbricks.com | 1.80 | 26.4% |
indiaproperty.com | 0.79 | 11.6% |
makaan.com | 0.66 | 9.7% |
commonfloor.com | 0.44 | 6.4% |
indianrealestateforum.com | 0.29 | 4.2% |
property.sulekha.com | 0.27 | 4.0% |
propertywalla.com | 0.26 | 3.8% |
allcheckdeals.com | 0.21 | 3.1% |
realestateindia.com | 0.21 | 3.1% |
Source: Google Ad Planner, February 2012
When looking at frequency of visit, some of the smaller players come to the surface. However 3 of the top 4 also have good return frequency levels with Makaan the only one not making the list. Interestingly these return levels are still not of the same magnitude as the market leaders in Australia and the UK achieve.
Frequency | |
keralahomeslive.com | 2.8 |
indianrealestateforum.com | 2.6 |
99acres.com | 2.3 |
zameen-zaidad.com | 2.2 |
propertywalla.com | 2.2 |
magicbricks.com | 2.1 |
propertyfeast.com | 2.1 |
indiaproperty.com | 2.1 |
commonfloor.com | 2.0 |
in.iproperty.com | 2.0 |
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.
Page impressions provides some more insight into who can really claim leadership. Here we see that 99acres is pulling away from magicbricks.com with 35% of the page impressions to the top 10 compared with 27%. The top two have >60% of the page impressions indicating good levels of content and potential stickiness of the site.
PI (m) | % PI’s | |
99acres.com | 13.0 | 35.5% |
magicbricks.com | 9.8 | 26.8% |
makaan.com | 3.8 | 10.4% |
indiaproperty.com | 3.2 | 8.7% |
indianrealestateforum.com | 1.6 | 4.4% |
commonfloor.com | 1.6 | 4.4% |
propertywalla.com | 1.1 | 3.0% |
property.sulekha.com | 0.8 | 2.3% |
zameen-zaidad.com | 0.8 | 2.3% |
realestateindia.com | 0.8 | 2.3% |
Source: Google Ad Planner, February 2012
Now this one surprised me. The vertical search engine Nestoria, rocketed away from the pack with nearly 10 pages per visit. This is surprising as their business model is about driving traffic to other sites and not holding the traffic on their own site.
PI/Visit | |
nestoria.in | 9.7 |
zameen-zaidad.com | 8.8 |
indiaproperties.com | 7.1 |
keralahomeslive.com | 7.0 |
99acres.com | 6.8 |
makaan.com | 5.8 |
indianrealestateforum.com | 5.5 |
magicbricks.com | 5.4 |
investinnest.com | 5.0 |
propertyfeast.com | 4.3 |
Source: Google Ad Planner, February 2012