In December '07 a curious thing happened. Trulia, that little Mapping-Real-Estate-Vertical-Search-Engine-That-Could surpassed Zillow, that $87MM-VC-Financed-Property-Value-Estimate-Real-Estate- Search-Vertical in unique visitors.
I guess you need a map of your home more often than you need a valuation.
For December, '07, Trulia stood at #7 with 1.6MM unique visitors/month, just behind #6, HomeGain, with 1.8MM visitors and ahead of #10 Zillow with 1.4MM.
However, Zillow was #3 in market share, with a 2.3%, beating #10 Trulia at 1.4%. Greater Market Share, but fewer unique visitors?
I guess non-unique (returnee) visitors need value estimates more than they need maps.
Interestingly, one of the ways Zillow determines that a home is for sale is to track the number of visits to their Web-page for the home. When they see a spike in their traffic they know there is either a home for sale or the boss just listed his/her home.
What Zillow really needs to keep their numbers up, is a way to maintain that "in-play" traffic.
If you liken this traffic phenomenon to the Republican Nominating Process: Romney/Zillow has more money, yet is loosing to that, had-to-let-some-staff-go-in-the-recent-past-for-lack-of-money upstart McCain/Trulia.
If you're selling a commodity, particularly one where people buy one at a time like a home, unique visitors mean a lot. But if you're in the media business, selling advertising: total traffic, page views and click-throughs, are the critical numbers.
It's all about the numbers. And Zillow leads in % Market Share.
Although Move.com/Realtor.com had over double the traffic of any other Real Estate Website, there were no other Realtor Websites in the top ten for unique visitors(The Realtor's must have number). Zillow, Trulia and the other media Websites, use our data, repackage it, sell ads around it, and take all the ad money we're leaving on the table.
Our 1000 page NAR contract with Move.com prevents us from starting our own media/ad revenue Website and capturing some of our lost loot. Good news for MSN Real Estate (#2), Yahoo Real Estate (#3), HomeGain (#6), Trulia (#7), Zillow (#10) and Google Base (#?).
Who signed that NAR/Move.com contract anyway? Did we get out lawyer-ed?
No Real Estate National Brokerage Websites show up in the top 10 for unique visitors, but RE/MAX (#4) and Zip Realty (#7) are in the top ten list for Market Share. I guess people look at a good number of houses/pages on these broker Websites before they decide to check out the home's map and the home's value.
When will we Realtor's learn something from Google, Yahoo, MSN, Zillow and Trulia?
Will we learn it before or after it's too late?
Posted by: Cliff Jacobson
Adapt Or Die! Happy Searching.
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