We at iBuildNew want to reinforce our commitment to assisting our builder and land developer partners during this turbulent time.
Changes in Online Homebuyer Behaviour
iBuildNew has experienced a moderate decrease in website traffic and builder referrals. For the month of March, we delivered approximately 10% less referrals to our partners than we’d forecast at the start of the month.
However, it’s important to recognise that homebuyers are still actively conducting research about their next build. In fact, our data indicates that homebuyers are now more engaged in their research than ever before.
The desire from our audience to build a new home remains strong. What’s changing is how our audience is conducting their search. We have observed this in a number of ways, including a key engagement metric from the iBuildNew website: Average Session Duration.
The Average Session Duration metric measures the average time a visitor spends engaging with the home designs, land estates and other homebuilding content on our site. From 1 March 2020 to 2 April 2020, the average homebuyer spent approximately 6.5 minutes on iBuildNew. This is an increase of 10% over previous months (pre-COVID) and is double the increase from the same period last year. In fact, we saw a record high – of nearly 10 minutes – as recently as 24 March (indicated by the red arrow).
Online homebuyers are spending more time than ever before, looking at a greater variety of home designs and house and land packages. This trend is not isolated to iBuildNew and is no doubt reflective of homebuyer behaviour throughout the market.
How Does This Affect You?
With such a captive audience, it’s more important than ever that you are showcasing the entire potential of your inventory online. For example, on iBuildNew:
– Are you using the highest quality images you have available?
– Are all of your designs and packages currently online?
– Did you know that you can upload and showcase 3D virtual tours of your home designs?
– Do all of your designs and packages have floor plans?
– Have you uploaded links to any of your videos hosted on YouTube or Vimeo?
– Are all of your current promotions being featured?
– Do all designs and packages have full descriptions and are all the optional extras current and complete?
This is an ideal time to reach out to your iBuildNew BDM and ensure you are taking advantage of every opportunity available to you.
Thank you,
The iBuildNew Team
1800 184 284
