– mapping the road to homeownership In


Google UK’s James Bacon and Bickey Russell share their latest research and discuss what this means for your business.


T


he internet, not the high street, is the new battleground for business among estate agents. If you want to find a new house, you don’t get into the car, or wander the high street agency shops – you go online. Every agent has a website, every agent is signed up to one portal or another.


Google is often at the centre of internet property search and every agent needs to understand its role in getting a housebuyer to his website. But the agent also needs to understand the behaviour of housebuyers in how they search for a property online. Over the past two years the UK property market has been going


through one of the toughest periods in its history. Most property businesses we’ve spoken to have had to dramatically rethink their business strategy to ensure that they are being as efficient and effective as possible. In many cases this has lead to a shift in focus from offline to online marketing because the Internet is now the place where homebuyers conduct their search for a new property. With 72 per cent of UK households now having broadband


connections (source: Ofcom CMR, 2010) and growing all the time, the Internet is being used in increasingly tailored and sophisticated ways by house hunters to find and research property. The ability to search for almost any kind of information that may influence a property purchase has been the main reason why the Internet has become so popular with homebuyers. While property portals, estate agents and house builders offer prospective buyers incredible levels of detail on individual properties, home buyers can also research local areas, schools, transport links and many of the other important factors while they are online. Despite it being common knowledge that most people in the


market do the bulk of their research online there has been minimal information available on how this online research process works. There is limited data available on the kind of sites house hunters look for, how many sites they visit or even how long the research process typically lasts. For marketers and property businesses, understanding how the property seekers’ consumer journey online


12 DECEMBER 2010 PROPERTYdrum


looks is key to planning effective marketing campaigns. This is why, earlier this year, Google commissioned Nielsen to


conduct a ‘clickstream’ study to establish some clear insights on the property space online. The primary objective for the study was to obtain an in depth understanding of the user journey towards finding a new home online.


Here are some of tHe results:


the pathway to purchase Your home is the biggest purchase you’ll ever make which means deciding on which property to buy is not an easy task. With so many factors influencing the final home buying decision the whole process can be complicated and lengthy. One of the first things we were able to see from our study was


that the online journey leading to a decision on a property is indeed very complex! Prospective buyers access many different online resources and dip in and out of them at different stages of the journey. When we compare this with similar studies we’ve conducted in the finance and travel industries, we see that the process is considerably longer for property seekers where many different types of sites are visited.


GraPH 1 – Converters


Throughout a typical journey, the most active user visits, on average, 13 different sites a total of 47 times. Property buyers spend around 120 days searching for properties on the Internet and could be active online anywhere between three and five hours throughout the process. To give some context from Nielsen clickstream studies into other sectors, the average journey for Finance (credit cards) is closer to 50 days and for Travel (holidays), its about 30 days. One common theme is that Google remains at the centre of the


process, linking people to the information they are looking for. This fragmented journey means that the job for marketers becomes a lot harder – you can’t just rely on being in one place.


’s exclusive and very timely report,


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