Filipinos meeting brokers online to shop for homes
The country’s top online property portal Lamudi Philippines reported having 15 million user visits last year, growing its internet traffic close to five times since 2014 as more Filipinos engaged in “property window shopping.”
In a press briefing on Thursday, Lamudi Philippines CEO Bhavna Suresh said the company hosted more than 100,000 active listings last year alone, accounting for over 1.1 billion square meters of properties either for sale or for lease.
Based on consumer data collected from the online portal, the Philippine property sector was still a buyer’s market with 61 percent of listed properties last year put up for sale and only 39 percent were for lease.
Consumers check at least eight listings on average, spending 10 minutes per visit. Of these organically driven online searches, 60 percent are repeat visits.
This showed high intent among property seekers to purchase or lease in the next six to 12 months, Lamudi said.
The online market did not say how many of these online views translated to actual transactions, noting they prioritized monitoring online traffic over monitoring actual sales.
But with the popularity of the online platform, most, if not all of the country’s largest developers, were already using Lamudi to promote their properties to a wider audience.
“We have all the big developers and more established ones with us. In the last couple of years, a lot of smaller and new developers were also showing [online],” Suresh said.
In 2017, 59 percent of property hunters looked for houses, a relatively smaller figure compared to previous years, she added.
She said the numbers suggested the market was starting to look at other properties, particularly condominiums and land/lots, which accounted for 14 percent and 12 percent of online searches, respectively, last year. Apartments accounted for 11 percent.
Of the house and lot searches, 49 percent looked for properties priced at P5 million and below, 35 percent for homes priced up to P20 million, and 13 percent for those priced up to P150 million. Four percent of online searches looked at properties with an over P150-million price tag, Lamudi said.
Quezon City accounted for 8 percent of online listings and 15 percent of total views. Makati City followed with 12 percent of online listings and 10 percent of online traffic.
Paranaque and Pasig each had 8 percent of online listings, while Taguig, Manila, and Davao had 7 percent each.
When asked how the online platform was received outside of Metro Manila, Suresh said Lamudi was “very confident” with the data they gathered in the National Capital Region, Cebu, and Davao.
“Outside that, we don’t have much,” she said, noting there were still emerging markets in Iloilo, Bacolod, General Santos City, and Cagayan de Oro.
The portal has a network of 5,000 real estate brokers. Only Professional Regulation Commission-licensed practitioners are enrolled to ensure credibility and professionalism.
Globally, Lamudi is present in over 30 countries, with more than 900,000 property listings.
