Hmmm... now, carry the two... square root of mouse...
From the lovely and talented Sara Bonert (@sbonert) over at Zillow blog, I learn that Zillow gets 55% of all California buyers:
Over half (55%) of those who reported using the Internet as a tool in the home buying process used Zillow. Realtor.com continued to be the most used site as 89% of buyers used it; with individual real estate company sites at 81%; individual real estate sites were used 66% of the time. Yahoo! Real Estate scored with 53% and Craigslist was at 49%.
I wonder (aloud) on the comments and on Twitter whether this is a good thing for Zillow, seeing as how they’re coming in fourth out of six options, behind Realtor.com (89%), individual brokerage sites (81%), and individual agent sites (66%).
The dashing and charismatic David Gibbons (@davidgibbons) responds:
@robhahn dude, you are not serious … try answer this … if you own a broker site do you get 81% of buyers? [hint: no, but Z does get 55%]
David does have a point. But I fear 140 characters can’t do justice to my point. So here goes. CAVEAT: MASSIVE UNSUPPORTED SPECULATION FOLLOWS BELOW THE FOLD.
In my little prognostication about the upcoming Trulia Blog Platform vs. ActiveRain, I neglected to include HomeGain in the mix. Louis Cammarosano of HomeGain pointed out over on the followup OnBlog thread that HomeGain had launched an Agent Blogging Network earlier this year, and that they were even conducting blogging schools for agents on HomeGain. It’s an excellent idea all around.
Very interestingly, Louis wrote this in the comments:
HomeGain continues to be one of the top visited sites on the interenet-with a difference-listings are not the main attraction-realtors are.
So now we have three distinct models to compare in a way: Trulia as the listings-centric consumer site, ActiveRain as the content-centric consumer site, and HomeGain as the realtor-centric site. As the industry continues to evolve, I think we’ll see how the different approaches play out. But where are they now?
Naturally, I got curious and started digging around a bit more.
I don’t know that using third-party traffic analyzers, such as Compete.com, is necessarily proof of anything. At the same time, I do think comparing different sites on the same analytics platform could lead to interesting insights and things to talk about. So I ran a quick and dirty analysis comparing the three abovementioned sites. This is the tale of the tape. Read the rest of this entry »
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