The ComScore numbers are out for August 2008 and all sites are down month on month and more importantly year on year. rightmove.co.uk continues to be the stand out leader in the market with 2.4m UV’s with findaproperty.co.uk in second place with 1.3m UV’s and propertyfinder.com in 3rd place with 1.1m UV’s.
| Unique Visitors | Aug-08 |
| Real Estate Category | 7,572 |
| RIGHTMOVE.CO.UK | 2,400 |
| FINDAPROPERTY.COM | 1,304 |
| PROPERTYFINDER.COM | 1,123 |
| PRIMELOCATION.COM | 929 |
| NESTORIA.CO.UK | 508 |
| THINKPROPERTY.COM | 414 |
| UKPROPERTYSHOP.CO.UK | 377 |
| HOMESANDPROPERTY.CO.UK | 321 |
| HOMESONVIEW.CO.UK | 300 |
| HOTPROPERTY.CO.UK | 296 |
| ZOOPLA.CO.UK | 261 |
| GLOBRIX.COM | 253 |
| OURPROPERTY.CO.UK | 232 |
| FISH4HOMES.CO.UK | 214 |
Source: ComScore MediaMetrix August 2008
However, deeper analysis of the top three sites shows that although the UV gap may not be much, the frequency, total visits, total minutes, and page impression gap is much larger with rightmove.co.uk having over 6 times the number of page impressions as second placed findaproperty.co.uk. In fact rightmove.co.uk alone accounts for over 40% of all page impressions from UK real estate sites.
| UV’s (000′s) | Freq. | Visits (000′s) |
Min / Visit | Total Min (MM) | Page Imp (MM) | |
| REAL ESTATE SEGMENT | 7,572 | 3.3 | 24,988 | 9.3 | 232 | 488 |
| RIGHTMOVE.CO.UK | 2,400 | 3.3 | 7,920 | 11.7 | 93 | 207 |
| FINDAPROPERTY.COM | 1,304 | 1.8 | 2,348 | 9.6 | 23 | 33 |
| PROPERTYFINDER.COM | 1,123 | 1.5 | 1,685 | 5.8 | 10 | 16 |
Source: ComScore MediaMetrix August 2008
Some people will look at the month on month variations and draw conclusions however this can be affected by seasonality, the amount of PPC spend and even short term marketing campaigns. Therefore it makes more sense to do some deeper analysis by looking at the year on year growth of the sites. As you can see, all of the top 4 major sites are down year on year with findaproperty.co.uk dropping less than the rest.
What is interesting is that below the big 4 there are two groups emerging – the second tier old school sites and the young turks. The second tier old school sites all dropped dramatically year on year – e.g. thinkproperty.com decreased 44%, homesonview.co.uk decreased 46% and so on while the young turks (nestoria.co.uk, globrix.com and zoopla.co.uk) all emerged from obscurity to be taking the place of the second tier old school sites. However there is still a long way to go for them to really take on the big 4.
| Aug-08 | Aug-07 | % Change | |
| Real Estate | 7,572 | 9,291 | -19% |
| RIGHTMOVE.CO.UK | 2,400 | 3,404 | -29% |
| FINDAPROPERTY.COM | 1,304 | 1,455 | -10% |
| PROPERTYFINDER.COM | 1,123 | 1,469 | -24% |
| PRIMELOCATION.COM | 929 | 1,250 | -26% |
| NESTORIA.CO.UK | 508 | 196 | 159% |
| THINKPROPERTY.COM | 414 | 745 | -44% |
| UKPROPERTYSHOP.CO.UK | 377 | 511 | -26% |
| HOMESANDPROPERTY.CO.UK | 321 | 334 | -4% |
| HOMESONVIEW.CO.UK | 300 | 560 | -46% |
| HOTPROPERTY.CO.UK | 296 | 497 | -40% |
| ZOOPLA.CO.UK | 261 | 0 | New |
| GLOBRIX.COM | 253 | 0 | New |
| OURPROPERTY.CO.UK | 232 | 508 | -54% |
| FISH4HOMES.CO.UK | 214 | 569 | -62% |
Source: ComScore MediaMetrix August 2008
Over the last year, the overall UV’s to online real estate sites has decreased 19%, even through the complete internet market UV’s are up 12%. Therefore if we take the % change in real estate UV’s into account and look at what percentage of the total real estate UV’s are attracted to each site, what we see is that rightmove.co.uk has lost around 5%, findaproperty.co.uk gained 1%, propertyfinder.com lost 1%, as did primelocation. The big winner was not globrix.com but nestoria.co.uk which gained 5% of the UV market.
| Site UV’s % of Total RE UV’s | Aug-08 | Aug-07 |
| RIGHTMOVE.CO.UK | 32% | 37% |
| FINDAPROPERTY.COM | 17% | 16% |
| PROPERTYFINDER.COM | 15% | 16% |
| PRIMELOCATION.COM | 12% | 13% |
| NESTORIA.CO.UK | 7% | 2% |
| THINKPROPERTY.COM | 5% | 8% |
| UKPROPERTYSHOP.CO.UK | 5% | 5% |
| HOMESANDPROPERTY.CO.UK | 4% | 4% |
| HOMESONVIEW.CO.UK | 4% | 6% |
| HOTPROPERTY.CO.UK | 4% | 5% |
| ZOOPLA.CO.UK | 3% | 0% |
| GLOBRIX.COM | 3% | 0% |
| OURPROPERTY.CO.UK | 3% | 5% |
| FISH4HOMES.CO.UK | 3% | 6% |
Source: ComScore MediaMetrix August 2008
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{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
While comscore is useful it is no where near accurate.
While I was working with a large UK sports portal we had access to Google Analytics and ComScore.
The difference in unique visitors was sometimes 50% out, page impressions varied between 20%-60% difference. Usually over estimates than under estimates.
I also find it hard to believe that of the 7 million users looking at houses on the internet only 37% use rightmove. With rightmoves dominance in the market people seriously house hunting would use rightmove as their first point of call.
Scotland however is a different matter, but with a population of only 5 million I doubt that Scotland would make such a difference.
John
I agree with you that ComScore is not necessarily accurate in terms of absolute numbers however, if we are more interested in relative sizes, then ComScore is the most accurate tool that exists. In addition, it is more accurate than circulation and readership numbers for traditional papers.
It is easy to trash the numbers however it is more important to understand long term trends, especially between players, to see if the market is truly changing or if it is just stable with alot of noise. For me, the UK market is pretty much stable at the top end with no real progress being made by anyone in the market.
What is more interesting is the rise of the nestoria’s, zoopla’s etc at the expense of the second tier.
Thanks for the comments and please keep them coming.
Simon Baker
Editor
Property Portal Watch
I agree with Simon that comScore is the most accurate tool currently available for competitive analysis. I work for one of the sites in the list and can confirm that the comScore figures are under-reporting by about 30% but are reasonably consistent and therefore reliable enough to use.
Hitwise is useful to show changes in market share but the relative values between the sites are often completely wrong. The use of percentage share rather than actual figures also reduces the value as it makes interpretation much harder.
Interesting coverage of the Comscore stats but I think it should be acknowledged that the ‘young turks’ are not the only new presence in the market.
FindaProperty.com and Primelocation.com, while separate brands, are now part of The Digital Property Group (TDPG) – which also contains Findanewhome.com and homesandproperty.co.uk. TDPG approaches agents with a collective proposition so should be considered as a single entity in this kind of comparison.
Comscore’s figures for August show that TDPG is clear second to Rightmove and continues to make ground. The gap between the two was just 355k unique users in August 08, which is the smallest it has been to date. In August 2007 the gap was 1.09 million unique users. In May of this year it was 728k.
Although The Digital Property Group shows declining traffic, its year-on-year decline on the previous month (-4.6%) and year-on-year (-11.4%), is much healthier than its competitors. In comparison:
Rightmove has seen a 7.9% decline month-on-month and 29.5% decline year-on-year. Propertyfinder has seen a 6.3% decline month-on-month and a 23.5% decline year-on-year.
Interesting figures, i have london base property site, according to that figures, it is 110% correct, now i’m getting lot of traffic from news property search engines like nestoria and zoomf rather than rightmove,privelocation or findaproperty.
Hi Simon,
Ed from Nestoria here. Interesting analysis. As you point out comscore is far from perfect, but is a useful directional tool. Nevertheless, whether pageviews, visits, clicks or whatever is being measured, I think the true metric is leads – how many potential buyers are sent to sellers. Unfortunately no external measurement tool can capture this.
Thanks for your flattering comments about Nestoria. I do want to make one point though: Yes, we have grown our share of total visits, but this isn’t at the expense of others. We send Nestoria users out to our clients – ie the portals. We provide a simple service that allows users to search quickly and easily. Every one of those users then becomes a visitor to a portal – we make no attempt to keep them on Nestoria. By making the browsing process simple I would argue (and this is confirmed in our discussions with our partners) that we’re growing the total pool of potential visits for those sites that work with us.
Keep up the good work w/ PPW.
best,
Ed
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