Housing market activity - some interesting data

I’m a big fan of using volume-based data to get a sense of where markets are going, and I came across this interesting example of activity in the UK housing market…

The table above is a screen grab using Snagit from the PropertyPortalWatch site - a website which measures everything that is going on in the online property market.

The data I captured shows the volume of people (“unique users”) who visited the top housing property websites during August 2008. It shows that all visits to the over property website market were down by 19% compared with August 2007 - a sure sign that there are significantly fewer house buyers out there as the housing market weakens further. This kind of data ties in nicely with recent news on the substantial fall in new mortgage approvals. A good example, I think, of how volume data can give a good steer on the direction and strength of a market.

I was also interested in the relative market share data for the leading property websites. The clear leader is www.rightmove.co.uk, with a 32% share of website visitors. However. rightmove’s share has fallen by 5% in the last year, losing out to new competitors in the market, particularly www.nestoria.co.uk