Jul
07
2009

Google Real Estate

Posted by under Consumer Behavior

Google has entered the real estate listings business by allowing users to find property listings on Google Maps. Searchers are still offered the usual business listings but are now also offered the option to see property listings as well. The listings include some basic filtering and the ability to save and share the results.
What will be the impact of this change on the Real Estate category? It’s hard to say but the following data and analysis offers some clues.
Hitwise data reveal that last week, Google Maps sent 2% of its US traffic to websites in the Real Estate industry, making it the #19 downstream industry (among more than 160). Yahoo! Real Estate, Realtor.com and Trulia all accounted for a larger volume of traffic to real estate listings than did Google Maps.
A Google product manager told The Age that real estate queries are increasing on Google. Hitwise data indicate that the share of visits Real Estate websites receive from Google Maps has increased 68% year over year to June 2009. But Google Maps is tiny compared to the 100 pound gorilla, Google.com. Google.com accounted for 24%, or nearly one in four visits to Real Estate websites in June, up 18% year over year in June.
The real question for Real Estate websites is whether (and when) property listings will be included in the search engine results page on Google.com.

Hitwise US: Top 10 Real Estate Websites, Week to July 4, 2009
Real Estate Top 10.png

TAGS:
CATS: Consumer Behavior

  1. Heather
    Could you rephrase your comparison for us the traffic to real estate sites from Maps vs the traffic from Google.com? You appear to be using to different measures or perhaps I am misunderstanding it.

  2. Absolute agree Heather! The way for real estate professionals and their websites to have their properties stand out and get noticed will be as a result of having presence with their keywords in search engines, this is what gets real estate found!
    The reality is unless you are employing a successful SEO strategy the chances are, you experiencing very limited success in competing with the millions of other offers on these sites.The good news is Real estate search remains localized and it is not super competitive to keyword rank.
    Most industry experts agree that Google feeds on fresh content and gives real estate video content priority, that is over all other forms of content online!
    So the bottom line is to be able to create multiple optimized videos for your properties and distribute across the internet so they can rank quickly – the higher the rank, the earlier your real estate will list in search results and the more prospects you will receive from search engines – this is what can be achieved with our new service http://www.propertysyndication.com launching soon!

  3. Mike, Sure, here are the figures using the same metric for both Google and Google Maps.
    Share of Upstream Visits to Real Estate in week to July 5, 2009:
    - Google 24.24%
    - Maps.Google.com 0.46%
    - and for context, Yahoo! Real Estate 1.53%
    Hope that clears things up.
    Best, Heather

  4. Google Goes After Real Estate, But Has a Long Way to Go

    I don't know what's up with Google lately, but there have been a couple of big launches that

  5. I really have a difficult time understanding why Google would even want to buy into the real estate market at all? I understand they are shooting for total internet domination, but it seems to me that they are beginning to spread themselves a little thin at this point.

  1. No trackbacks yet.

You must be logged in to post a comment.