New Zealanders recorded a whopping 141.6 million searches for residential property last year across the country’s top property websites, a 30.5% increase on 2020's 108.5 million searches.
Where property sales and listings are concerned, Kiwis are spoiled for choice, with more than 100 sites vying for contention.
However, the largest volume of searches falls across only a handful of listing and auction portals.
Data from web analytics firm Similarweb shows Trade Me’s property site was the busiest at 50.5 million hits, followed by realestate.co.nz with 19.9 million visits across the past two years.
NZME-owned oneroof.co.nz was at 15.5 million and homes.co.nz had 12.5 million hits over the same period. Homes also had the biggest annual increase in overall visits, trending up by almost two thirds to 7.75m last year, up from 4.8m in 2020. Oneroof was up 34% year-on-year to 8.9m visits.
Of that, about 54% of all viewings were via mobile sites.
The spike in online interest shadows booming property sales over the calendar year, with the latest Real Estate Institute numbers for December showing annual house price growth at 23.3% for the full year.
Similarweb country manager Matt Hodgson said superheated traffic into NZ property portals are also well ahead of comparable Australian numbers which bounced 24% for the year.
Both markets, however, were up across the board on the back of record-low interest rates and a 'fear of missing out'.
Trade Me property sales director Gavin Lloyd said interest in properties on the site had jumped 47% last month compared to pre-pandemic numbers through December 2019.
Mandarin language site Skykiwi.com also saw searches increase by 7.8% year-on-year to 592,800 for the month. That's ahead of the other Chinese site, Hougarden, which ranks at 82,166 visits on average per month, rating it 28th on NZ's top 100 sites.
NZME’s oneroof.co.nz was at 1.5 million individual visits last month while the busiest agency-owned site was on Auckland-centric barfoot.co.nz, which had 562,800 visits.
Fees tracking up
The property listings site of Trade Me, created in 1999 by NZ entrepreneur Sam Morgan and now owned by private equity group Apax Partners, is the country’s largest and the only platform that both charges fees for base listings and lets private sellers list properties.
Its direct fees for private listings of residential houses range from $499 for a property under $200,000, to $1,399 for property above the $1 million mark. Residential and rural land for sale rates varies from $429 to $719 per listing.
Lloyd wouldn't disclose fees paid by agents, which are separately structured, but property is a major income stream for the auction site.
For the year to June 2021, property classifieds generated $62.1m in fees, which was second only to the $86.3m that came out of the motoring segment. Another $34.4m revenue accrued from job ads.
Realestate.co.nz, a joint venture between the Real Estate Institute of NZ and four of the country's top realtors – Harcourts, Barfoot & Thompson, LJ Hooker, and Bayleys – is also fee-based for its listings.
These start at a lower $99 for a three-week listing to $199 per week for premium positioning – but aren't linked to the value of the home.
Because it is owned and supported by most realtors, it is considered a bellwether of residential inventory.
Listings on the site were up almost 30% year on year at 16,773 properties, from fewer than 13,000 a year earlier, as lockdown restrictions eased in most regions.
And while Trade Me and realestate.co.nz remain as the dominant property portals on pure traffic, the Similarweb numbers show that Realestate.co.nz and Homes.co.nz are well ahead on unique visits – closing out December with 659,806 and 576,614 visits respectively.
How competitive is it?
Shoring up its data and predictive software and beefing up its unique visitor numbers, prompted Trade Me to pay $18.8m for homes.co.nz owner PropertyNZ in November.
Not everyone was in favour of that deal, though it was approved by the Commerce Commission in November.
Ahead of the merger, registered valuer and Auckland realtor Graeme Berryman told the commission that further aggregation of the market into a restricted number of sites will “significantly reduce competition”.
That, he said, flew in the face of the industry expectation that smaller real estate agents should expect fairness of operation.
But now, with Trade Me holding about two-thirds of the total online spend across both agencies and private advertisers, that is no longer the case.
