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After about two years of static and falling traffic, UK property websites appear to be making a come back ^[2] with increased growth in traffic recorded in October by Hitwise, an online competitive intelligence provider. From October 2008 to October 2009 website traffic to UK Property websites increased by 4.8%.

Thanks to the supposed demise of the global credit crunch, traffic to top online property sites appears to be making a resurgence ^[3] and no doubt increased income.

Recent housing price increases reported by Halifax and Nationwide have certainly helped to funnel more traffic online as people generally use the Internet to search for appropriate properties first.

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Websites that act on this surge in traffic will benefit the most – especially if they increase their listings supply.

Some interesting website visitor stats:

• Increase in UK Internet traffic to property website is largely driven by a surge of visitors from the South of England.
• In the month of October 2009, Londoners were 15% more likely to visit a property website than the rest of the UK.
• Figures for the South East and South West regions were around 9% in comparison.
• The lowest representation online seen in the UK was from the people of Northern Ireland. Interestingly pre-credit crunch this region was one of the most popular.

The top ten represented postal areas who visited websites in October were all in London and surrounding Burroughs – the South East, with London East Central (EC) and Bromley (BR) topping the list.

The bottom ten was dominated by areas such as Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales and the North of England. Lerwick in Scotland (ZE) got the bottom representation of all of the regions.

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All images courtesy of: Hitwise ^[2]