2015 so far: Record demand from home-hunters
Despite predictions that the upcoming May election could slow home-mover interest, Rightmove recorded its busiest ever month for traffic and leads in January.
Visits hit over 100 million for the first time ever, home hunters looked through a record 1.5 billion pages of property on Rightmove, and our busiest ever days were Sunday 25th and Monday 26th.
Email and phone enquiries by home-hunters to agents on Rightmove hit 4.3 million for the first time, equating to around 100 enquiries every minute.
However, while that’s good news for your clients’ property exposure and your brand awareness, quality stock is still in short supply in some locations, as we move into the year of ‘the selective mover’.
This means it’s even more important that your hard-earned instructions are getting seen by the biggest and most engaged audience, and by advertising on Rightmove you can be assured that’s what you’re getting.
Check your new listings appear as quickly as you have promised
Rightmove has received some complaints from estate agents that their listings are being delayed for up to three days before appearing on Rightmove.
It seems some software providers uploading to OnTheMarket have built a 48 hour delay switch into their data feed to Rightmove, delaying new instruction instant uploads. There have been instances where this has been automatically activated as the default setting, delaying your sellers and landlords speed to market and access to the 1.4m daily instant alerts.
If this isn’t something you are aware of, we would advise you to check with your data-feed provider that your hard-earned instructions are getting maximum property exposure on Rightmove as soon as possible.
Motivating more home owners to trade up or down?
Though prices are now above what most people paid for their homes in 2007, agents still report a reluctance for people to come to market in spite of this growth in owners’ equity.
Mortgage rates are cheap, but negative publicity over stricter lending criteria means some could-be sellers are put off seeking advice from a local agent or mortgage advisor. This and the lack of property for sale can deter some owners from having their own property valued or marketed. More owners need to be enticed to come to market.
Rightmove’s website development team are looking at trialling some new ideas to help motivate and engage more owners to get their property valued by their local estate agents, so watch this space.
To also help, Rightmove’s regional seminars cover aspects of winning greater market share and start again in early February.
Early perspective of stock statistics
Agents have asked us for an accurate update on the portal market, due to the various conflicting information on industry channels.
We state below the UK stock including SSTC and let agreed as of Thursday 29th January, including resale, lettings and new homes and excluding Overseas. There have been some misleading media statistics about London so this is also included:
| As of 29th Jan 2015 | National | London |
|---|---|---|
| Total Market | 1,000,000+ | 170,000+ |
| Rightmove | 973,951 | 161,043 |
| Zoopla | 674,683 | 137,981 |
| Onthemarket | 311,721 | 59,640 |