Realestate.com.au has highest market share of any real estate website in the world

Realestate.com.au has the biggest national market share of any real estate website around the world, according to data compiled by its former chief executive, Simon Baker.

Each month, 3.8 million unique users visit the website, which is 17% of Australia’s population.

Baker has published a list of the top real estate portals ranked by the percentage of a nation’s population the websites reached.

Luxembourg’s athome.lu was second at 15.4%, or 100,000 people, followed by Belgium’s immoweb.be, which reached 14% of Belgium’s population with 1.4 million users.

Countries with much bigger populations congregated at the bottom of the list. Websites like China’s soufun.cn have 13 million users but only reach 1% of the nation’s huge population.

The list only includes the top real estate website in each country.

The list used numbers from Google Ad Planner’s January 2012 figures. It was published on propertyportalwatch.com by Baker.

“Lots of arguments can be made about the efficacy and even accuracy of this analysis. However, I wasn’t aiming for perfection, just in [sic] build a better understanding of the global market place and how everyone is placed,” Baker writes.

Baker was chief executive of REA from 2001 to 2008. The company launched in 1995.

Property Observer notes 3.8 million unique users does not necessarily translate to 3.8 million different people visiting a website. One user could visit a website from several devices, such as a home computer, a work computer, ipad and a smartphone and the REA website would register three different unique users.