One of Australia’s newest independent and free real estate websites, Thehomepage.com.au has burst into life after placing an impressive eighth place amongst real estate classifieds websites with monthly UB’s of 157,808, according to information released by the Audit Bureau of Australia.
Thehomepage.com.au may be a relatively new portal, but it is gaining favour fast with agents and browsers alike, currently catering to 1,650 active agents with 77,000 active listings.
The site has recently undergone a transformation resulting in a clear, simple delivery of search results and effortless functionality. Thehomepage.com.au features a straightforward search box on every page, which makes the navigation process lightning-fast. The site returns the browser only the most relevant results, with no irrelevant paid-priority listings cluttering the search.
Ben Stockdale, CEO of Thehomepage, says:
Both the volume of the listings and the traffic is growing faster than we originally anticipated, which is terrific. Feedback from the real estate community has been exceptional. The free listing guarantee and the simplicity of the new design are clearly really working for buyers and sellers.
Well done to the team at Thehomepage.com.au! If you’re not already listing your properties on this portal then stop complaining about Realestate.com.au and begin to support a young, fresh, free alternative.
12 Comments
James
Lets see what happens after all the hype from prospectus dies and down and we see what happens to the share price if it gets up.
As for supporting it why would the industry want to create another rod for it own back by supporting another site that is while not at this point looking to profit from the industry based on listing fees but will be from several other services.
Vic
James are you getting “thehome page” mixed up with “onthehouse”? I think the home page is privately owned.
Rachael Lord
I love the design of this site.. We’ve been signed up for about a year now and although email enquiry doesnt come from these, it’s another good way to show clients your advertising on many portals when they google their property. THP & MP are also good to follow on twitter and facebook. Very up with the times!
Jayne Harwood
I just love the guys at The Home Page. Right from the beginning they were keen to embrace Tassie which doesn’t often occur from Real Estate Portals! They were also keen to receive editorials on our unique Launceston properties for their weekly newsletter and even featured some of our properties which is just fantastic free publicity for our vendors.
I believe there can be a place for new players and whilst it remains free to list why would you not want to expose your vendor’s listings on such a great site.
Bill Burdin
All strength to guys at the homepage.
Glenn Rogers
Get the Google ads off the homepage !
It looks as if you don’t get enough traffic to attract direct advertising.
Yeah I know some of you feel different, but thats my take on it.
Ryan O'Grady
I agree Glenn, I think Google ads look tacky. Lets hope they are only temporary until they source some advertisers.
Vic
Whilst I agree to some degree re google ads. They do fill a gap in the advertising spaces created by the web developer and in time as the page views increase these spaces will become premium spots for directly sourced advertisers.
The homepage’s ads are not overwhelming the site and visitors would not find them offensive. IMHO.
As long as the site is clear, functional and fast it will continue to give good user experience and this is what thehomepage is so far achieving- particularly since it has launched it’s new home page search.
One criticism so far is that a visitor cannot search by ALL regions in Australia. For example The East Coast of Tasmania is a well know region. When I enter these words I get queensland properties. The search system seems only to be able work using suburb search. OK if you know the suburbs and you are buying locally- but for someone from another State who is looking for a general area to re locate- a problem.
Glenn Rogers
I didn’t say they were offensive but I do believe they send a less then professional message to users.
I’ve no idea what level of dollars they generate, if it was good enough I would understand, I just assume it’s income generation is minimal and not worth compromising your image for.
James
Yes VIC my mistake. Thanks.
Ben Stockdale
Hi all,
The Google Ads actually return very nicely as filler but that’s all they are, fill. They actually do self heal and get better visually the longer the pages are live.
We do understand the lack of email enquiry in previous months but you’ll be pleased to know that when we ran a week of stats we’re actually converting UB’s to email enquiry at 2.5%. I didn’t and made the guys run the figures multiple times. So the new design is working really well.
Region search is something that we’re working on for a future release.
Cheers
Ben
Vic
Interesting email leads % Ben.
Only takes one week into account but I daresay that it is a higher rate than REA or Domain. However at the end of the day it is the total number of leads and agent gets per property that count for them.
Nevertheless, new portals need to watch the email/UBs metric and do all they can to ensure that they achieve an optimum % strike rate and maintain this throughout their growth. I would suspect that REA and Domain have not done this and would be well below 2.5%.
At watersidepropertysales we would never expect to have anywhere near the eyebals that anyone of the big 5 portals achieve- EVER. However we have set a high target for strike rates for email leads per UB and the following is the trend over 5 months.
Strike rate UBs to email leads % increase in Visitors
Jan 7.4%
Feb 4.6% 1.2%
Mar 5.7% 21.2%
April 4.0% 13.6%
May * 5.6% 21.1%
* Property alerts function was installed mid May and already is having an impact.
The point I’m getting at here is that we, that have free to list portals, must not only look to getting the content on our sites but we must at all times aim to continually improve the relevancy of our sites by remembering the value that agents give us with the content and forever strive to bring quantity and quality of leads to them. This is why we spend time any money looking at things like our new property alerts system, email enquiry and search by region system.
So popping out a % won’t really cut the mustard unless your clients can see continuous improvement through hard trend data.