Predictions 2009 - Australia

On the surface, the Australian property portal market ended much the same way it started with realestate.com.au dominating the space and domain.com.au continuing to struggle in second place. We also had myhome.com.au come and go in the market while homehound.com.au and realestateview.com.au continue to show promise but with little headway. However, there were changes at the various players that could mean 2009 will be an interesting year.

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realestateview “Fastest Growing” Threat

According to Nielson Net Ratings, between January – October 2008 realestateview.com.au was the fastest growing real estate portal in Australia.

The site achieved a growth of 29.8% versus 8.5% for market leader realestate.com.au and only 0.9% for domain.com.au.

Launched in May 2001, realestateview.com.au is a joint venture between the Real Estate Institute of Victoria Limited (REIV), which holds a majority share, and some of Australia’s leading real estate agencies.

Although it was originally established to offer industry-owned competition to the major independent portals, beginning with Victorian properties, it has failed to bump realestate.com.au or domain.com.au from first and second place.

August 2008 figures placed realestateview.com.au fourth overall, behind homehound.com.au with 312k UB’s.

The market continues to be dominated by realestate.com.au which registered 4.2m UB’s in August.  Second place domain.com.au had 1.9m UB’s while third placed homehound.com.au had 427k UB’s.

IPMG May Be Looking to Sell homehound.com.au

It is rumoured that Independent Print Media Group may be looking to sell homehound.com.au - Australia’s third largest residential portal site.

homehound.com.au is the result of a partnership between the Independent Print Media Group (owned by Michael Hannan) and Property Page Pty Ltd (owned by Ray White, Raine & Horne, LJ Hooker and Century 21).

Over the last 12 months, homehound.com.au has dramatically increased traffic to the site from 213k UB’s in August 2007 to 427k UB’s in August 2008.

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homehound.com.au (Updated 9/2008)

homehound.com.au is the 3rd most popular site in the Australian market and promotes itself as the industry owned site that takes a simplistic ‘google-esque’ approach to searching for property.

homehound.comau has undergone rapid growth in UB’s over the last year and now has 420k+ unique visitors to the site each month.  However this is still 12% of the traffic to the market leading realestate.com.au.

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Traffic to Australian Property Portal Sites (Aug 2008)

Nielsen NetRatings recently released it figures for the Australian residential property portal market for August 2008. 

The results show that realestate.com.au continues to be the dominant player in the Australian market with 4.2m unique browsers in August compared to the number 2 player in the market, domain.com.au that had only 1.9m unique browsers. 

71% of people looking at the Australian real estate market at least looked at realestate.com.au while 32% at least looked at domain.com.au.  Note: browsers of the real estate category do look at more than one site.

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