People in New Zealand looking at real estate sites online spend 73% of that time on Trade Me Property (incl Trade Me Flatmates). That’s a staggeringly high percentage of traffic, and indeed Trade Me Property has been leading the way for some time.
To work this out I took Domestic Unique Browsers x UB Frequency (sessions per month) x Average Session Duration, which gave me very large numbers in seconds. I then converted these numbers into years – so in January 2007 there was 84 years worth of time spent browsing real estate, and 62 of those years were on Trade Me. Next biggest was realestate.co.nz with 10 years, which means that 85% of time was spent on either Trade Me or realestate.co.nz. Harcourts was next with just 2.8 years.
Measuring time spent on sites is a great leveler – attracting visitors is hard, but retaining visitors that actively browse through the site is much more difficult. Trade Me has won the battle for buyers, and it is just a matter of time before the remaining real estate agents follow.
Lance Wiggs 
I’d so love to make some comments about this, but I’ll refrain. In fact I typed 2 or 3 rebuttals and then deleted them ;-)
LikeLike
please do comment – otherwise I’ll never know what the rebuttal is.
I do think there is room for more than one player in the market, but frankly I was surprised by the dominance of Trade Me on this metric.
LikeLike
It’s not really my place to rebutt. However, I’m not surprised at the dominance.
Any site that has as much traffic as Trade Me should be able to dominate in any market it turns it’s hand to now. As long as the execution is good, which would be next to impossible for Trade Me to bugger up.
Which will explain why APN does not feature for jobs or real estate despite it’s huge traffic. Crap execution.
LikeLike