News Releases
Property24 sets a new record in online searching
08/02/2008
Online property searching is becoming more popular by the day. Property24, SA’s biggest property portal, recorded 220,261 unique browsers during the month of January 2008 – the first time the portal has broken the 200,000 mark – and clocked up almost 4 million page views.
“This is very satisfying,” says MD Richard Gahagan, “as although January is usually a good month, the (quiet) first few days of a new year can have an adverse effect on traffic.
A unique browser is a visitor to the site that is counted once only for the month. Even if the same visitor comes to the site ten times in one day or week, he is counted only once. However, Property24’s other stats are just as impressive. The 120,000 property listings garnered over 1,2 million searches during January, and 10,570 SMSs were sent to estate agents from browsers that wanted to be contacted about a property they had viewed.
The free Keep Me Informed property alert function has around 20,000 subscribers, and 473,832 email alerts were sent to subscribers as new properties fitting their specified criteria were listed by the member estate agents.
“It is evident that the first contact with the consumer for buying properties is now the internet,” says Christo Wiid, GM of Real Estate Services, “because if we take into account that fewer than 25,000 residential properties get sold per year in South Africa, compared with the number of potential buyers visiting the site, it seems most potential buyers visit the site at some time or other.”
Property24 also offers extensive property news and advice articles, and during January 230,332 articles were read by users.
January’s success was complemented by the company’s current radio campaign promoting the Property24 Desperate Houses Season 2 competition, in which users can win R40,000 worth of home accessories or cash. Property24’s recent successes are also attributable in some respects to its recent victory in the CNBC International Property Awards, when the company took the award for the best property portal in South Africa against other strong competitors.
This all helps to prove that while the property market might be experiencing hard times, the amount of public interest in property news and trends is increasing daily, and clearly there are still a huge number of people searching for properties. With the increase in online activity, many people prefer to use the web for this kind of research.
“Perhaps some of our users are looking to sell up and downsize in keeping with the tougher economy,” says Gahagan, “and almost certainly many people are checking out the rental listings. The beauty of online means that they can do this 24/7, and the only cost is the dial-up or broadband.”
As the explosion of internet usage continues to take the world by storm, it seems searching online for property is without doubt the way of the future.
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