Graph of the Week: FindaProperty.com Records Highest Daily Traffic Ever
Our guys in the Research Team have some interesting news to report.
On Monday March 23, FindaProperty.com attracted 174,014 unique visitors. This is the highest daily level we have seen since daily tracking records began in mid-2006.
How do we explain this?
It’s partly down to the fact that in the week preceding March 23 we had two big events: the launch of our McDonalds Best Chance Monopoly promotion (win 2 x £300k to buy a home) and our partnering of Google to launch Street View UK.
But our research team also say the rise in visitor numbers is evidence of a pick-up in market activity: since the start of 2009, the number of visitors to FindaProperty.com has been 8.6 per cent higher than the same period in 2008.
In March, unique visitors to FindaProperty.com were up 6.7 per cent month-on-month and 8.6 per cent year-on-year.
Is the market enjoying a spring revival? We’d love to hear what’s happening in your neighbourhood.
Related Tags: General, traffic to property website, graph of the weekRelated Posts:
Posted by 
Loading ...
Good to hear some positives on stats! We too are seeing increases in both visitors and enquiries. Spring is in the air!!
Its lovely that you’ve had loads more traffic but I’m don’t think you can use this information to claim that the housing market is on the rise again.
Many people browsing this site will have no intention of moving. I have browsed similar property sites mainly just to see the extent of housing market slump and to see out of curiosity how cheap houses have got.
I don’t ever have any desire to go to see or to move to any of these houses.
Sounds like a research team trying to justify their existance.
Firstly it’s a single day (ever hear the phrase 1 swallow dosn’t make a summer)
Doubtful that they could separate the McD & Google stats (if they actually made any difference anyway)
Hi Paul
Interesting point – and, in some respects, a fair one – traffic, you’re quite right, does not equal sales. However, there are other market indicators that suggest a modest improvement in the market. These include:
• Loans for house purchase were up 19% in February – still low, at 37,900, but it’s a significant rise.
• Number of buyers registering with agents (as opposed to just looking) up 8.5% in March (Hometrack).
• Prices to earnings ratio is at a six year low. 4.34 in March. The long-term average is 4.0
• The proportion of postcodes registering a price fall over the month has fallen from 74% in October 2008 to 59% in February 2009. (Hometrack)
• Average time on the market down from 12.3 week sin January to 11.3 in March.
• % of asking price achieved: 88.8% compared to 88.3% in January
Fair enough but in the blog above you don’t state any of that information. What is written however, implies that site traffic alone indicates an upturn in the property market which is misleading.
Dear Rob,
Neil from our Research Team says:
Thank you for your thoughts and opinions regarding the “Graph of the Week: FindaProperty.com Records Highest Daily Traffic Ever” article.
In response to the points that you raised:
Whilst you are correct that the record traffic level focuses on the single day of Monday 23rd March 2009, we also found it interesting that this increase/shift in traffic was maintained further through that week.
Looking at the graph embedded within the article, the area highlighted by a black rectangle shows that for the Tuesday (24th), Wednesday (25th) and Thursday (26th) of that week, traffic held close to 160,000 unique visitors for each of these days.
These traffic levels were significantly higher than the Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday traffic seen previously that month (and also in prior months) which we thought was a very interesting trend. Traffic, by the way, was also up y-o-y.
There will of course be factors other than the McDonalds and Street View campaigns were running that will have an impact on site traffic levels.
Given the levels of increases seen in the traffic as above, and further research we have carried out in and around the times of the McDonalds advertising, we are confident that the increases in traffic seen are being pre-dominantly driven by these campaigns as opposed to other factors such as market conditions or seasonality.
Thanks for your comments, and I hope this provides more context to the comments within the article.
Be careful not to look for those green shoots too early. The market will fall even more.
The increase in traffic is great however I suspect this is not an indication the market is recovering but a result of you recent marketing efforts. You are partnering with some well known brands. It is certainly raising your profile!
What you seem to have done here is take four days in a row and put a box around them because the first one is higher than the rest… the variation between these days and the rest is tiny. Maybe it looks like some sort of statistically significant increase if you squint a bit… move your head back from the screen a little.. draw a box around some of the data points…
Was the market also picking up on March 9th? It crashed a tiny bit afterwards. Oh and it picked up again seven days later. It’s like a sine wave with a wavelength of seven days. Funny that, it’s almost as if people’s internet usage is dependent on some sort of “seven day cycle”.
Great article - if you’re looking for false hope.
Please! we’re not nearly into the depths of this crisis at the moment, we have a long period to get through before things stabilise. Like all recessions, there will be temporary rises in spending and they will be followed by severe falls, this will happen 4 or 5 times before things get back to ‘normal’.
Please don’t say the market is coming back, it’s not, just look at what has happened in every other recession for facts.
It just goes to show you can’t be too careful
Paul/David/Biologista
Guys, can I first of all say that we’re not trying to ramp the market here - if we were we wouldn’t have added the key caveat that the rise in traffic is mainly due to recent marketing campaigns.
Please note my reply above to Paul which speaks of “a modest improvement in the market”. I think that’s a reasonable interpretation of the current state of play.
We are noticing real signs that the market is changing. We have experienced new instructions attracting more real interest, attracting more than one buyer and achieving prices closer to the asking price.
So, the usual Spring up-surge in housing activity interest , coupled with some new company alliances raising brand profile, has produced a transient 9% increase in people browsing your site. This recession is far from over, nor has it hit rock bottom. Our local Estate Agents have gone bust, so I’m not expecting a market revival this year. In fact, until my kids have paid off Gordon’s disasterous bail out scheme’s, I doubt there will be anywhere near the activity we have recently become accustomed to.