Jonathan Cardella

• Manage |RSSTechnology, Tools and Tidbits

Compete.com's traffic numbers are about 3-4x lower than actual for websites around 250K visitors/mo and under. As the site gets larger, this multiple decreases. Thus a website getting showing 500K unique visitors/mo on compete may actually get closer to 1M. And, fyi Trulia reports over 4M uniques per month, I believe... But even at 200K visitors/mo, we could all use some more traffic! The compete growth numbers are relatively accurate, btw. Another consideration is the fact that the majority of the traffic that lands on the home page is passed to external broker urls, e.g. zeyphyr, prudential, etc. I am sure this has a big impact on the way traffic is reported because if a user enters at one of these broker sites and uses the Roost search/app, the traffic isn't being picked up and reported by compete.com, because it never hits the domain. But Roost still sees the traffic. I found this post interesting because Roost isn't the only company showing customers a brokerage other than the listing broker. While the Roost model is to show the sponsoring broker (who provided the IDX feed and presumably ad dollars) the NeighborCity.com model is to bring back the most qualified local brokers and Realtors® for each given search, neighborhood, and property. For example, a search for San Francisco Real Estate provides three local Realtor® profiles, while a click deeper takes you to the Top 50 San Francisco Realtors®. This takes much of the guess work out of finding buy side representation. Jonathan Cardella Co-Founder, CEO American Home Realty Network, Inc. http://www.NeighborCity.com

It's interesting to note that a few of the top movers this month are from Florida; with floridamoves.com making its way to 86th and NaplesArea.com making a major lead of over 500 places. I have also heard that markets are starting to warm up all over Florida... So it isn't just foreclosures that are moving. It seems that the most sold off markets are starting to see buyers return. Jonathan Cardella American Home Realty Network, Inc. http://www.NeighborCity.com

I always get a kick out of the HiteWise rankings. It is surprising that Inman goes with Hitwise despite Compete.com offering more accurate results and for free! For example; Cyberhomes.com just left the top 100! It generated 343K visitors in December according to Compete.com, where as Realtybid.com is showing up as about 45K visitors in December, and it just entered the top 100. Go figure! Top for what? see; http://siteanalytics.compete.com/neighborcity.com+realtybid.com+cyberhomes.com/?metric=uv And the fastest moving websites is an absolute joke. For example, vacationsonly.com is not even a real estate website yet it is in the fastest moving RE category. In fact, it has nothing to do with real estate and according to compete.com, it gets about 1,500 visitors per day (see http://siteanalytics.compete.com/vacationsonly.com/?metric=uv) and is down 7% in December and down 32% in 2008. Definitely fast moving, just int he wrong direction! Real Estate search sites like http://www.NeighborCity.com and estately.com are up 1130% and 511% respectively in 2008, yet I haven't seen them mentioned by hitwise once. Is it possible that you have to subscribe and pay the $25-50K/yr to be included in these rankings? Inman, try compete.com, its free! Jonathan Cardella Founder/CEO American Home Realty Network, Inc. http://www.RealEstateSpace.com