The true test of a leading portal site is not how many unique visitors or visits its receives but its ability to convert that traffic into revenue and eventually profit.  The team at Classified Ad Ventures (owner of Property Portal Watch) has scoured the world and put together a list of the top 25 revenue generating property portal sites.

The top five sites are all market leaders, all generating over US$100m per year, and all profitable.  The highest revenue generating site is immoscout24.de in Germany followed closely by realtor.com in the US.  Rounding out the top 5 is soufun.com.cn in China, realestate.com.au in Australia and rightmove.co.uk in the UK.

To ensure that there is an “apples with apples” comparison, we have attempted to report the advertising related revenues earned by a particular site (e.g. realestate.com.au) and not the business that may own them (e.g. the REA Group as a whole or the REA Group in Australia).  We have, where possible, stripped out revenues for ancillary services such as secondary websites (e.g. holidaylettings.co.uk for Rightmove), web development (e.g. for realestate.com.au), software (e.g. Pericles for Seloger) and print revenues.

The list was assembled through a combination of publically available information, interviews, market speculation, and internal analysis.  Where we were not able to source the exact revenue numbers for the 12 months ending 30 June 2009, we have estimated then using interviews and outside in analysis of the businesses.  In short, these are our best estimates of revenues over the last 12 months (to 30 June 2009).

There are some sites that are not on the list as we didn’t have enough information on them – e.g. anjuke.com.cn and athome.co.jp.  If you have any information on the sites we have covered above or those that we may have missed, please let us know.  We are keen to keep this list up to date and expand it as best as possible.

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