Top 10 Real Estate Websites by Traffic – 2020 Update

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Real estate websites have a huge impact on the housing industry. Nearly every American spends time on one real estate website or another, looking for homes for sale, researching home prices, and staying in touch with the real estate market. NAR, the National Association of Realtors, reports that 95% of home buyers will search for their next home online. This report specifically focuses on websites buyers are using to search for homes.

We pay extra on the top real estate websites.

It is obvious where home buyers are, and we watch the numbers closely. Because most home sells are due to internet marketing, we track where the buyers are engaging online and pay extra money direct to real estate websites to make our listings show up higher in the results or pop with additional branding. End result – we sell more homes in the city of Portland than any other. We run the same program in 16 counties in Oregon and Washington, consistently selling homes faster and for more, due to our commitment to additional paid marketing efforts. See our entire home selling program here.

The Top 5 Real Estate Websites Get More Traffic than the Rest Combined.

Data provided by SimilarWeb.

Real Estate Website Traffic Monthly Averages Nov. through Jan. 2020:

Website

  1. Zillow.com
  2. Realtor.com
  3. Trulia.com
  4. Redfin.com
  5. Movoto.com

Monthly Visitors

  • 173 Million
  • 82 Million
  • 51 Million
  • 42 Million
  • 13 Million

Visit Duration

  • 7:22
  • 6:39
  • 5:15
  • 4:57
  • 4:08

The Bottom 5 still get millions of visitors.

  1. Coldwellbanker
  2. Remax.com
  3. Homes.com
  4. Estately.com
  5. KW.com
  • 6.6 Million
  • 5.3 Million
  • 4.8 Million
  • 3.3 Million
  • 2.8 Million
  • 2:48
  • 3:19
  • 4:04
  • 2:46
  • 8:08

Biggest Losers from 2019 Traffic Report

  1. Homes.com dropped to a third of their traffic from last year. Lost millions of active users. Massive drop. Something is very wrong at Homes.com. They had a site rebuild recently, must have gone terribly for them. They dropped out of the top 5, and if they are not careful will drop out of the top 10 shortly. Or, if they fix their problems, they might just pop right back up to where they were before.
  2. Century21.com dropped out of the top ten, after ranking 9th in 2019 and 8th in 2018.
  3. KW.com, Keller Williams’ website, fell to the 10th spot after climbing the last few years. In 2018 they were ranked 9th and in 2019 they were ranked 8th.

Up and Coming – Top Real Estate Websites to Watch

  1. Homesnap.com
  2. Compass.com
  3. Exprealty.com
  • 1.7 Million
  • 1.3 Million
  • .8 Million
  • 3:53
  • 4:43
  • 7:13

Homesnap.com is growing at a fast pace due to its progress in partnering with local MLS services (multiple listing services) to display front-end public search listings instead of the MLS’ own public site. If that all sounds confusing to you, don’t worry. Just know that Homesnap.com is expected to grow in home buyer traffic by leaps and bounds in the next few years.

Compass.com is the home search website for Compass Realty, one of the fastest growing Realty companies in the U.S. They are dumping millions of dollars into their tech products, so we’ll watch and see if it pans out.

Exprealty.com is the 4th largest Realty company in the U.S. and the fastest growing Realty company in the world and already has a huge presence in all 50 states and internationally. Their home search website is poised for incredible growth and the user duration, over 7 minutes per buyer, is very impressive.

Recommended Local Home Search Websites

Real Estate Agents typically will not recommend the top 10 websites by traffic. Why not? Well, there are data problems. Zillow in particular is notorious for this, but it is somewhat understandable. They are trying to display every home for sale in entire country, taking data from hundreds, even thousands of different sources – which creates errors, overlaps, and omissions. All of the national portals above have significant data challenges, both in how fast they can update, and also how they are able to translate the data from so many different sources. This often means some local MLS data is cut out. Realtors often recommend websites that are direct feeds from local MLS sources – so the updates are near instant and there is one source of official local data for each home for sale. Locally in Oregon and Washington we recommend (depending on where you’re searching):

Because these sites are direct local feeds from an MLS in Oregon or Washington, you get fast, uncluttered, robust, and accurate data. They also have a fantastic user interface and are ad free.

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