Visits to UK real estate portals decline due to market slowdown

Analysis has revealed that traffic to Rightmove's website has fallen by 18% over the past year as high mortgage interest rates have taken their toll on the national property market since the start of the buying process.

The agency comparison service GetAgent has analyzed the year-on-year change in the number of monthly visitors to the largest online property portal in 21 different countries to see how the international property market is reacting to the general economic uncertainty and rising mortgage costs. The magnitude of change is calculated by comparing site visits in September 2022 to visits in October 2023. The annual decline seen in the UK is repeated in 16 of the 20 other countries studied by GetAgent.co.uk. Only Belgium (-37%), China (-27%), Portugal (-27%) and Turkey (-24%) have now seen visitation levels fall more than the UK. But there were also year-on-year declines in countries such as Sweden (-16%), UAE (-11%), Ireland (-8%), Canada (-7%) and the US (-5%). There are only four countries where the number of monthly visits to the portal increased compared to last year. They are Brazil (up 15%), Italy (up 6%), Czech Republic (up 6%) and Poland (up 5%).

Despite a decline in UK visitation, the country remains one of the most preferred property destinations in the world with 96 million Rightmove visits in one month.

According to the study, the UK's three largest portals - Rightmove, Zoopla and OnTheMarket - attracted 429.4 million visits between August and October 2023. Rightmove is still the most visited portal, taking 67.1% of total visits, followed by Zoopla (21.7%) and OTM (11.2%).

GetAgent CEO Colby Short said, "It's not surprising that the number of visits to the portal has declined over the last year. The market has slowed but not collapsed due to the economic turmoil which has seen mortgage interest rates higher than we have seen for many years in the UK. However, British property buyers remain ambitious, so they are still actively using portals compared to almost every other country studied in this research. "

Till recently, the hope was that the British government would introduce relief or reduce tax on property purchases, thereby causing a boom in the housing market, as it did when it introduced a tax vacation during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, Jeremy Hunt's Autumn Statement eventually passed with no discussion of such benefits, meaning that the downward trend in portal visits could potentially continue at least into early 2024.