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Steven Cross
Around a third of all visits to thehomepage.com are now coming from mobile devices, more than double what it was at the start of the year, the company reported.
CEO of listing website thehomepage.com, Ben Stockdale, said he was pleasantly surprised when he saw the latest figures.
“Since the last time we really looked at these figures, we’ve increased much more dramatically than we ever thought,” Mr Stockdale told Real Estate Business.
Mr Stockdale said the percentage was at 15 per cent in January.
“We were aiming for around the industry average of around 20 per cent, but getting 32 per cent of all our hits coming from mobile devices is great news.”
Mr Stockdale believed growth in the smartphone market is continuing to rise, with a recent Google report on smartphone use supporting this view.
Additionally, other players within the real estate space are also acknowledging the shift towards mobile usage. This includes LJ Hooker, which recently launched 582 mobile websites for its offices as part of a $16 million spend on various online initiatives.
The Google report Our Mobile Planet, which was based on the responses of 1,000 Australians who identified themselves as smartphone users, found that 86 per cent of respondents looked for local information using their smartphone, with 88 per cent of those taking some form of action as a result. Also, 23 per cent of respondents said they had looked at apartment and housing information.
The report, which was released in May, also found that 38 per cent of respondents expected to use their smartphone more to access the internet in the future.
Mr Stockdale has developed his mobile website to be simple and easy to navigate, while still putting “a lot of consideration into each pixel”.
“We will get a feel from the statistics in the future and user feedback to see where we go from here," he continued. "We’ve still got a few tricks up our sleeve though.”
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