I was reading an article, 14 Scary Facts About The US Real Estate Nightmare, that is guaranteed to give most real estate agents heartburn. Dropped in at #6 was a blurb that real estate searches are down about 20% from last June till June 2010 (date of article).
Knowing that I had read something similar, but more in-depth, I went about searching Google to find some corroborating evidence of this decline. Google was no luck, but my bookmarks bailed me out with a saved link to an article by the Notorious R.O.B. titled Something Wicked, This Way Comes: Housing Market Signals in which he expresses his misgivings about the housing recovery.
Notorious, who runs a brilliant blog if I may say so, cited a blog post from Hitwise, the web traffic analysis company. The meat of the article relating to real estate searches was:
First, Hitwise reports that year-over-year visits to websites in the Real Estate category are down 22% for April of 2010, and that is 11 consecutive months of traffic decline:
That there is a pretty steep curve...
However, Hitwise also reports that visits to "Home & Apt Rental" websites are up 45% in April 2010 year-over-year, and that represents the tenth consecutive month of increases.
WOW!
I strongly recommend that you read the rest of Notorious' article as you will come away smarter for it, but as a real estate agent who is very dependent on Internet leads, the issue of declining Internet searches got me to thinking.
Here are some of the questions (and maybe answers) I came away with:
- Why the drop-off in May 09? The industry has been in distress since early 2008 at a minimum. Were the 08 numbers OK because 07 was brutal (Hitwise doesn't provide 07) or is there some other hidden consumer online search characteristic in play?
- Pouting is not going to make the eyeballs come back, so how am I going to tailor my SEO so I am doing a better job of attracting a dwindling pool of online real estate searchers?
- Perception is reality and potentially many internet searchers BELIEVE that they cannot afford to buy a home and that they must rent. How can I change that perception?
- And combining on the last 2 points, maybe I need to be optimizing for keywords targeted at renters and converting qualified renters to qualified buyers.
I would certainly welcome your opinions on this ominous phenomenon of disappearing eyeballs.
Comments(2)