Who's Looking Where: "OverseasCafe" latest survey on web based searches.

euromortgage said:

My arguement is this, that a lot of these searches would be generated by people in the industry, researching their own markets and looking at competitors etc. I agree it gives a very broad perspective but I wouldnt call it acurate.

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People in the industry tend to have good knowledge of current trends so I can't see any problem with their searches being picked up and recorded the same as everybody elses. Contrary to your opinion I think this would make the results more, rather than less, accurate.

Regarding the results for France - perhaps the lack of interest is because it hasn't slumped like other countries so there are few bargains to be picked over?

The market has slowed down in France so there is better value for some areas. Bargains are to be had. But you got to look very hard. And make offers well below listing price.

High end stuff shows no sign of 'softening' on price.

My own experience is only in the Cote D'Azur and I'm told things are pretty flat there, but no serious declines. Apparently its the Russians who are keeping the CDA buoyant.

I'm sure there have been some declines in less up-market parts of France. Don't have any figures though.

Figures have been released for May, you'll find them and a brief interpretation of the results [broken link removed]. There is also a listing of percentages from January to May which gives a more accurate estimate of interest for the year-to-date. Monthly figures can be affected by new, in the news, hot-destinations, although negative sentiment has been more obvious in the market this year which has brought the old reliables of the UK and US to the top.

Something that needs to be factored in when considering these figures is that existing property owners in a market will regularly google the same or similiar search terms as those looking to buy to keep up to date on prices, rents and availability where they have purchased. When you consider the couple of hundred of thousand Irish people who have bought abroad since 2000 then this traffic will have a significant impact on garnering any accurate trends on new markets from general google traffic.
A more accurate way to get this information is for property portals to break down the number of page views that result in "click through" enquiries regarding specific markets/developments. Then you can see definite trends towards specific markets.

TRMA said:

existing property owners in a market will regularly google the same or similiar search terms

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In our experience existing property owners tend to be far more specific when looking for details of their own property, i.e. they will search for the address or property in that specific area. You don't get too many property owners in Duquesa, outside Estepona, for instance, doing web searches for 'Spanish Property'. The search terms used by OverseasCafe to collate the statistics tends to be far more general than those used by property owners so we would be confident that this is not a huge factor in the results.

TRMA said:

A more accurate way to get this information is for property portals to break down the number of page views that result in "click through" enquiries regarding specific markets/developments. Then you can see definite trends towards specific markets.

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We considered such a course of action when we started to release stats from the site but decided that traffic to the OverseasCafe.com site would not be as representative of what the public were interested in as would a breakdown of search terms being used by Irish internet users in general. Just because they don't visit our site doesn't mean that they are not as interested in overseas property as anyone else nor does it mean that their interest should not be recorded.

That was the approach we took in any case and we still feel that it was the right way to handle statistic collation. We're not saying the process is perfect, all we're trying to do is get a handle on Irish trends, we feel this is of interest to people and that we have been reasonably successful in these attempts. It is important not to read too much beyond this into the figures.

Dont get me wrong - I agree that reports like this are a good resource for giving an overview of the market and where Irish people are interested in. Just as an extra to that, for us as an agency, a more specific report from which we could see definite trends via click throughs would be a great resource tool. Something to consider for the future maybe.

If you, or any other agent, drops me a PM I'll collate figures for visits to the site as opposed to those actually searching on the web for whatever time period you wish.