Home-hunting activity sets new records

The 795,280,583  page views recorded on Rightmove’s website equated to more than one million pages of property being viewed every hour during the first month of 2012, and broke the previous high for pages viewed set in May 2011.

The record traffic also propelled Rightmove to 7th place in the chart of most ‘page-viewed’ websites by the UK public according to Experian Hitwise .

 Only web giants Google, Facebook, eBay, YouTube, Amazon and Yahoo are placed ahead of Rightmove in terms of popularity by pages viewed. The next highest property-related website is Zoopla in 83rd place.

Rightmove director Miles Shipside comments:

“We’re seeing more traffic than ever on Rightmove as the home-moving public turns its attention to the property market for the year ahead. Agents looking to gain an early competitive edge should be considering what they can do to win their share of their local audience and steal a march on the competition as we build towards the spring moving season.”

Rightmove’s record traffic was driven by its 13m unique visitors to the site over the course of the month , another new record. January is a traditionally busy month on Rightmove with January 2011 also seeing records broken. Rightmove has helped heighten home-mover interest during January through continued investment in its ‘Britain Moves at Rightmove’ TV campaign.

Shipside adds:

“We’ve seen an encouraging start to 2012 not just in terms of Rightmove traffic, but also a slowly improving mortgage outlook and more positive market sentiment. Buyers, sellers, renters and landlords are out there, and we are working hard to capitalise on their activity by putting as many people as possible in front of Rightmove member advertisers so that they can win their business.”