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Hitwise Intelligence - Robin Goad - UK
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Property websites and the online house price crash
December 17, 2008
In September we revealed that online House and Garden retailers had overtaken Property websites in terms of UK Internet visits. As you would expect, in the three months since that blog post, the situation has only got worse for online estate agents. Traffic to our Property category has fallen a further 21% since then, and currently sits 14% down year-on-year.
In an earlier blog during the summer we highlighted the correlation between searches for ‘house prices’ and the actual house prices themselves. However, although searches for ‘house prices’ have declined, we British cannot completely abandon our national obsession. As the chart below illustrates, UK Internet searches for the term ‘house price crash’ have increased by 44% over the last 12 months while those for ‘house prices’ have fallen by 20%
One website that has benefited from this shift in search behaviour is Housepricecrash.co.uk. It’s UK Internet traffic increased by 43% between November 2007 and November 2008 – almost exactly in line with growth in searches for ‘house price crash’. The table below, which is a screen shot from our new Demographics tool, shows how the Experian Mosaic profile of the site has changed over the last year.
The largest group of visitors to Housepricecrash.co.uk (both of which are over-represented relative to the online population as a whole) are the affluent Urban Intelligence (young professional city dwellers) and Symbols of Success (the richest and most financially successful Mosaic group). However, the Index included in this table also compares the site’s current Mosaic segmentation to a year ago, allowing us to identify the groups that have increased their audience share. The two most significant are Suburban Comfort and Happy Families – as the names suggest, both stable ‘middle class’ groups that are well represented on the site and are visiting it in increasing numbers.
Over the last 12 months Housepricecrash.co.uk has moved up the rankings from 17th to 9th in our Property category, but it is not the only site containing information on house prices. There are a number of sites such as OurProperty.co.uk (currently ranked 11th), HousePrices.co.uk (19th), NetHousePrices (25th) and MousePrice.com (47th, up from 101st a year ago) also providing house price information, often utilizing data from the Land Registry. A custom category of these types of sites (and Housepricecrash.co.uk) increased its share of visits to our Property category from 5.1% to 5.5% between November 2007 and November 2008.
One of these websites, OurProperty.co.uk, recently added some additional Land Registry information (dating from 1995 to 2000) and saw a massive spike in visits as a result. As the chart below illustrates, the site received over five times as much traffic as usual on November 28th, a quarter of which came from email. In return for the new data, users were asked to provide information about their own properties (e.g. number of bedrooms, bathrooms, etc. – i.e. info that is not included in the Land Registry statistics). It looks like this data collection exercise was successful; OurProperty.co.uk’s average visit time increased from around 4 minutes to almost 7 on November 28th.
Posted by Robin Goad at 09:00 AM
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In Categories Demographics | Economy | Experian | Mosaic lifestyle | Property | Search
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