With the exit of allrealestate.co.nz from the New Zealand market and the redirection of their traffic to realestate.co.nz, what does this mean for New Zealand real estate agents?
Last month it was announced the allrealestate.co.nz would be closing its operations and redirecting its traffic to the realestate.co.nz site. This can be either good news or bad news for New Zealand real estate agents. Good news in that you now only have to advertise on one site to get to a broader audience however bad news in that there is more concentrated power in the hands of realestate.co.nz.
On balance, I think that this is good news for New Zealand real estate agents as long as realestate.co.nz doesnt increase the cost of its subscriptions. I dont believe that they will and this believe is backed up by the words of Alistair Helm, the CEO of realestate.co.nz in a recent comment he posted on www.propertyportalwatch.com.
“I can further confirm that this move is in the best interest of the consumer - who get a far more comprehensive single portal and for the industry a more valuable industry owned site. The principle of the site has always been to safeguard and protect the industry from the profit motives of the major media owned competitors - we maintain and will into the future a very cost competitive and highly transparent subscription model - $200 per office per month - no discounts.”
The real benefit for New Zealand agents is that they now will receive more leads for the same price that they were paying before. Historically realestate.co.nz was receiving around 250k to 300k unqiue visits per month. With the redirection of the allrealestate.co.nz URL and the links on the realestate.com.au site to realestate.co.nz, traffic should increase to over 400,000 unique visitors per month so assuming email and phone call leads are generated at the same rate, agents should receive between 30% and 50% more leads for the same price.
I am expecting that traffic to the realestate.co.nz site will increase as the New Zealand public become more aware of the fact that realestate.co.nz has the broadest range of listings for sale and rent - by a significant margin. This is also good for New Zealand agents as this should also increase leads.
Now the challenge for New Zealand agents is twofold. Firstly, how to make sure that the listings they advertise on realestate.co.nz are the best they possibly can be and secondly, how can they stand out from the crowd - ie how can an agent make sure that their listings and their brand stands out from their competitors on realestate.co.nz.
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Simon,
Appreciate this perspective on the future of the NZ real estate market - naturally I have been following the traffic since the 1st December closure of allrealestate.co.nz. After just 4 days we are seeing traffic (visitor sessions) up 5% on the combined traffic of the 2 sites in the prior week!
I have just analysed the stats and produced a graph outlining this result on the Unconditional blog.
This is pretty significant as historically the online traffic to real estate websites falls off from late November up to Christmas and the rebounds massively in January (down here in the southern hemisphere - its summer of course!). On a like for like basis our web traffic is up 34% week on week!