The internet has totally change the way Filipino buy and sell properties. From paying per column centimeters waiting for a call inquiry for sellers and browsing through pages and pages of 5 point text through classified ads with a red ped and highlighter on hand for buyers. For sellers all you need to do now is go online, create and account, post and ad and wait for inquiries. While buyers can just type a location, property preference and even budget and boom, all sorts of choices and information are presented on your screen.
One of the proof for the changed behavior is Lamudi Philippines, one of the first online real estate site in the country, who has reported , citing its own data and analytics, that they are now officially the most visited real estate website in the Philippines. They said visits to their platform for the first six months of 2015 is 34 percent higher than those recorded for the entire 2014. In addition, at 320,000 monthly visits, Lamudi’s site visits via desktop are now at least 28 percent higher than its nearest competitor.
I met the executives of Lamudi Philippines and MyProperty.ph executive recently and they told us that they joined forces in May 2015 to further cement its position as the Philippines’ number one property website after acquiring $18 million funding to strenghten their operations.
If you are not familiar with the site yet, Lamudi Philippines is a first in Philippine real estate, harnessing its massive online and listings data to generate reports and other content for Filipino homebuyers and property investors. Aside from listing they also publish information and tips on condo, house, and commercial property price data.
Lamudi found out through their data that most Filipino homebuyers still prefer houses over condos, despite Metro Manila’s condo boom, and that Quezon City is the most searched city in the Philippines for properties. Furthermore, Lamudi found that U.S.-based house-hunters are looking for houses more than half of the time (57.8 percent) and that after Quezon City, Makati, and Manila, Tagaytay and Baguio are the fourth and fifth most searched cities by Filipino-Americans/
