Realestate.com.au continues to dominate the market

Realestate.com.au, the international property sales website company, has reported record revenue for six consecutive half-years, with its latest revenue up 23% to $238 million.

REA Group’s portfolio includes 13 property websites, with most ranked number one in their respective markets including Australia.

It ranks as Australia’s fifth largest digital display advertiser by revenue – and the 12th most popular website in Australia, according to Nielsen Online Ratings.

The group achieved 20% revenue growth in Australia in its latest financial year, despite the softening of the property market in the second half.

Shareholders were told the Australian website had 6.5 million unique browsers in September 2011, who made 596 million page impressions compared with domain.com.au, which had 3.5 million unique browsers and 236 million page impressions.

They were also told both the existing unique browsers measure and the new unique audience measure showed that realestate.com.au had maintained a significant lead in terms of both reach and engagement metrics. Nielsen Online Ratings is the new online audience measurement solution to measure the reach and frequency of online audiences.

The unique audience figure was 2.6 million for realestate.com.au and 1.6 million for domain.com.au.

People spent an average 43 minutes a month searching the realestate.com.au site.

In Italy, its site, casa.it, continued to strengthen despite Italy’s economic challenges with revenue up 113% to €12 million. Its Hong Kong online revenues grew 74%.

“As we learnt in Australia during the GFC, difficult economic conditions can deliver gains for online,” the chairman Richard Freudenstein noted in his annual general meeting address.

“According to the latest figures from IAB Australia, the Australian online advertising market is on track to surpass $3 billion in 2012 and REA Group is well positioned to benefit from the market’s continued growth,” he advised.

REA Group was added to the S&P/ASX 300 Index in September 2010 and its market capitalisation has averaged around $1.5 billion since that time.

The REA Group was named in the 2011 Forbes Asia “Top 200 Best Under A Billion” list of high-performing Asia-Pacific companies with revenue under US$1 billion.