Top 10 US Property Portals

Over the last couple of weeks we have looked at the top 10 Australian and United Kingdom property portals. What was clear from both these markets its that realestate.com.au and rightmove.co.uk dominate to the extent that you can add the traffic or page impressions from the next 9 together and still not reach the traffic or page impressions of the market leader.

However, the US is a different story.  It is a much closer market with a number of portals vying for leadership.  Driving this is a MLS environment where sourcing listings from the market is much easier than in Australia and the UK.

Yahoo real estate and Zillow are competing for the most unique users with Yahoo at 13m and Zillow just behind at 12m.  The grandfather of US property portals, the Move Inc run realtor.com, has 10m and Trulia has 9m.  Clearly there is no dominant portal from a consumer perspective.  Interestingly, the listings on Yahoo are sourced from Zillow making advertising on Zillow a good move for realtors.

When looked at from a visits perspective, the top sites Yahoo and Zillow each account for ~20% of the total visits to the top 10 sites.  This is vastly different from the UK where rightmove.co.uk accounts for 55%.  Interestingly, realtor.com does well on a visits perspective accounting for 17% of the visits to the top 10, just behind Zillow and Yahoo.  This indicates a loyal audience generating a higher number of repeat visits.

When looking at frequency of visits, Redfin actually comes out on top with 3.5 visits per unique user each month.  Zillow and realtor.com are just behind with a frequency of 3.3 and 3.2 respectively.  However these are all behind the frequency of visits to rightmove.co.uk in the UK where unique users visit the site an average of 4.9 times per month.

Finally, when looking at page impressions, Zillow, realtor.com, and Trulia dominate accounting for 2/3rd of the page impressions of the top 10 sites between them.  Zillow comes out on top with 490m or 24.6%.  Interestingly, none come close to the 800m of Rightmove in the UK.

When looking at the page impressions per visit, homes.com does a great job of engaging the user while Trulia comes in second.  The one that does stand out is realestate.yahoo.com where pages per visit are just 4.4 or ~1/3 of those to Zillow where the content is the same.  This indicates that Yahoo is driving or attracting low quality traffic to its real estate section.