Exploring Digital Trends in Real Estate

Using Similarweb 's "Web Category Analysis" I was able to identify who the Category Leaders have been over the last 3 months in Australia in the Real Estate sector. These insights are based on the top 100 websites in the Real Estate industry.

To no surprise the Top Player is Realestate.com.au who received 10.78M unique visitors to their website in the month of May 2024. What is also incredible to see is that Property.com.au who is owned by REA Group is coming in at 3rd place with a yearly change of 111% growth.

REA Group 's assets make up 3 of the top 5 players in this category and Domain holds the other 2 with domain.com.au and allhomes.com.au .

With numbers like this, who can challenge these 2 dominant players?

Below are a few examples along with some noteworthy mentions. Highlighted in green some good news stories from some local players and an interesting shift to search outside of Australia as the shortages in property prevail highlighted in red

Keyton is a retirement village aggregator that has seen a huge spike in growth to its website in the last 3 months with some incredible improvements to their organic search strategy and their email marketing focus. 

As you can see email is up >5000% and which has a strong correlation to their direct volume growth. 

Organic search is up 47% and this is due to a strong focus on keyword optimization. 

Not giving away any secrets here but you can use Similarweb to see which keywords are driving this success and the results are super interesting.

The Property Market - Central Coast specialize in lifestyle real estate right across the Central Coast, Lake Macquarie and the hinterland. The specialized site has seen some interesting growth over the last year.

The traffic  to their site saw a significant increase from 548 visits in June 2023 to 15.6K visits in December 2023, driven mainly by a surge in organic search traffic. 

However, the traffic fluctuated in the following months, with a notable dip to 4.3K visits in February 2024, before rising again to 13.6K visits in April 2024. 

The main driver of these changes was the organic search traffic. With this localized and laser sharp focus for one area, imagine what they can do when they expand. 

Highlighted in red above was Livabl and LandSearch who are 2 US players capturing the heart of local Aussie search visits. 

Livabl is North America's largest new home construction and builder marketplace. search over 20,000 new home, condo and townhome communities.

They have a heap of new listings that are seeing some strong trends in Canada - Could this be the #drake effect? Only Similarweb has access to data that is readily available with insights made available as of only 2 days ago.

Landsearch.com allows people to search millions of acres of land for sale and lease. 

Aussies are expressing their coastal interest views through Landsearch.com where we can see some increased trends for some specific interests. 

Why is this important for the real estate digital publisher?

The Australian market has consistently been strong, and the high volume of search visits reflects this.

Capturing the interest of property-savvy consumers is achievable, as smaller US players like Livable and Landsearch optimize their sites and target the Australian demographic in their search strategies.

With access to an alternative data source like Similarweb, companies such as Ray White , Raine & Horne Group , McGrath Estate Agents , and LJ Hooker , which are experiencing a decline in search trends, can better optimize their sites and develop a well-informed and robust search strategy to combat this decline.

If you enjoyed this article, please like, share and feel free to email me on jp.naim@similarweb.com to learn more in a personal session of how I found these insights.