In their latest press release, Realestate.com.au have just announced some enhancements to their mobile site…
Henry Ruiz, General Manager Consumer Marketing for realestate.com.au indicated the new mobile website features will allow obsessed property hunters to access important property information, at the touch of a button.
“Given the heightened activity in the property market realestate.com.au’s enhanced mobile site means property seekers can now access open for inspection and auction times in chronological order while on the go, so they can maximise the time spent on the property hunt,” he said.
“The site even allows house hunters to save notes on properties to their mobile and then access that information via their myrealestate account from their computer later on,” said Henry.
Since launching the mobile website in early 2009, realestate.com.au has experienced significant growth in traffic, up by 213 per cent(2) during a 12 month period.
“We have had a phenomenal response since launching to market last year with a high proportion (73.6 per cent) (3) of our users accessing the mobile website site via an iPhone handset,” said Henry.
“Our data indicates consumers using our mobile site prefer to call an agent directly from their mobile rather than sending an email. In fact 71.3 per cent(4) clicked to call an agent directly, reinforcing the high level of engagement and immediacy in response wanted by property hunters,” he said.
Other benefits of the mobile site include the new find an agent feature and ability to share property information via popular social networking channels such as Facebook, MySpace, Delicious and Twitter.
It will be interesting to see how popular the enhanced REA mobile website will be with users.
Mobile visitor traffic is only going to keep increasing as more and more people become used to using their phone for browsing the web.
This upgrade also coincides with Commonwealth Bank’s announcement to provide a mobile solution via CBA Combine Realestate.com.au Data into iPhone Augmented Reality Solution as reported here on Business2 last week by Glenn Batten.
The statistics for the Press Release were based upon:-
(1) 20 per cent of people indicated the ability to view properties via a mobile can help manage the mania of inspecting properties without getting stressed. Source: Independent online survey conducted by Longergan Research of 1,028 respondents for realestate.com.au, March 2010
(2) 213 per cent growth in unique visitors during a 12 month period from April 2009 to March 2010 Source: Omniture Site Catalyst
(3) 73.6 per cent of unique visitors to the realestate.com.au mobile site came from iPhone handsets. Source: Omniture Site Catalyst
(4) This is based on total leads sent to agents by mobile users. 71.3 per cent of unique visitors clicked to call an agent directly via the realestate.com.au mobile website, rather than those who emailed (28.7 per cent) an agent during the month of March. Source: Omniture Site Catalyst
6 Comments
Nick
They arent still going with the ‘obsessed property hunters’ marketing campaign are they?
Its a pity all the statistics are percentages. They dont actually tell you much about the mobile traffic. 213% increase sounds impressive, but if they started off with 100 people then its only 213 people using the mobile site. Because they dont say the percentage who use the mobile site vs the percentage that use the main site, I’d guess that its a insignificant part of the traffic.
Now if only they told agents what % of their inquiry/hits came from mobiles. *That* would be interesting.
Greg Vincent
Nick the Househunter videos were a marketing flop, but the HouseHunter competition seems to be building their Facebook Fans steadily.
I’m not sure what their projections were. I’m sure they were hoping that the Househunter videos had gone viral (for the right reasons) because they would have had a greater take up with their competition which would have generated a larger fan base on facebook.
REA originally had 622 fans back on the 13th of April and in just over a month they now have 4123 Facebook fans as of tonight.
Their facebook fans should start to grow significantly faster now that they have achieved a certain critical mass and will probably increase in size faster as the big prize gets closer to being drawn. (that’s the nature of competitions).
With regards to mobile stats. At the launch Greg Ellis quoted approx. 450,000 UB’s to the mobile site but I’m not 100% sure if that was just for the month of March when they’d had over 6.5 million UB’s. If so then that’s approx 7% of UB’s.
Pete Richards
I certainly think that a mobile website strategy should be near the top of the list for any real estate business that is serious about their online presence.
With the massive improvements of web access via mobile handsets, both in regards to speed and functionality, the percentage of total web-browsing that occurs on a mobile handset is climbing, and will climb even faster in the coming years.
Apple will eventually sort out the iPhone
Greg Vincent
Pete mobile is definitely the way forward. I’ve just read a great article about ‘To App Or Not To App’ by Teresa Sperti
http://digitalmarketinglab.com.au/index.php/2010/05/17/to-app-or-not-to-app/ .
Apparently, “Globally (according to AdMob), Google
Sal Espro
When is the CBA’s app being launched, cos it’s not there yet but St George’s is? Looks like CBA put-out the media release to try to combat St George’s app and then went-about building it! Tsk tsk Imagine a real estate agent behaving that way!
Jack
I think that a mobile website strategy is one of the best strategy for any real estate business.More and more customers will browse the web on their cell phones.Excellent post.I want to thank you for this informative read, I really appreciate sharing this great post. Keep up your work…