1 in 10 Kiwi homes researched in a month

Media Release

17 November 2016

1 in 10 Kiwi homes researched in a month

More than 10 per cent of all New Zealand homes have been the subject of more than 700,000 searches on Property Insights on Trade Me Property since it launched a month ago.

Nigel Jeffries, head of Trade Me Property, said more than 168,000 properties had been searched for since the free information service was switched on back on 12 October.

“It shows the voracious appetite that Kiwis have for useful property information, and might also show how nosy many of us are too,” he said. “We think New Zealanders have been desperate for this information and are curious to peek over the fence to see what’s going on in their neighbourhood too.”

Property Insights provides free property information for over 1.5 million New Zealand residential properties including previous sold prices and rateable values (RV). It also includes the Trade Me Property Estimate, a computer-generated estimate of what the property might sell for today.

Mr Jeffries said Property Insights gave Kiwis access to useful free data. “There’s no escaping the fact that some people find free access to this data controversial, but we think the vast majority of New Zealanders are very happy to have access to it without the hassle of visiting a council building or the expense of a paywall.

“It’s about time we made this data easier to get to – we’ve been lagging behind the US, UK and Australia who have had this information out in the ether for over five years.”

He said the playing field has been “levelled” with free data opened up. “Everyone has the same information, and both sellers and buyers have a starting point for the sale price of a property. It reduces the amount of guesswork involved using the old RV data as the starting point, or trying to crunch screeds of data to understand what the local market is doing.”

Island Bay in focus

The average user searches for eight properties during each Property Insights session. Among the 168,000 houses searched for over the past month, more than 1900 properties had attracted more than 25 views.

The most viewed house is a 120-square metre property in Wellington’s Island Bay which attracted 248 searches in the last month. “This house is for sale and clearly it’s in hot demand,” Mr Jeffries said. “Hopefully the data we help provide will ensure keen buyers make competitive and realistic offers, and the seller makes what the property is worth.”

Mr Jeffries said he expects to see Property Insights expand on two fronts over the next year “We expect to see our numbers jump even further as Kiwis realise the wealth of data they’ve got at their fingertips. And we’re going to be working hard to keep adding information to ensure we’re giving our members the best and most useful information.”

ENDS

About Property Insights:

· Property Insights is Trade Me’s free property information website

· It’s the most popular and comprehensive free property information website in New Zealand

· The site provides property information for over 1.5m New Zealand residential addresses and includes more than 2.1m historical sale records

· The free property information includes – previous sold prices, RV data, property size and the Trade Me Property Estimate. A computer generated estimate to provide a predicted sale price for the property

· Since launching last month 5800 new addresses are searched each day

· The Property Information is sourced from New Zealand Councils

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