An amazing figure emerged this week that illustrates just how consumer’s house hunting behaviour has switched online. Rightmove announced that the British Public spent over 5.5 million hours looking at property on their site last month. Just think about that figure for a moment and you’ll realise just how profound the shift in consumer behaviour is.
After all, Rightmove has only been going for around seven years, before which we had to get in the car and drive around estate agents’ offices if we wanted to find out what is on the market, supplemented with leafing through the local paper.
The amazing thing is that while house hunting has been revolutionised – and remember that 14% of visitors to Rightmove in July were looking on their IPad or IPhone equivalent – the estate agency business has really changed very little. Agents are still wedded to their high cost High Street offices, their high commissions and their contracts with long tie-ins.
Come back in 10 years and I’m sure that things will have changed radically with more estate agents moving to less expensive office accommodation away from the High Street and covering a much woder area from each office. Just like we do!