Lifestyle, Rural Real Estate Market Interest at All-Time High

United Country Achieves Record Web Traffic in 2012

February 5, 2013 – (KANSAS CITY, Mo.) – Over ninety percent of buyers start their real estate search online, and in 2012 they showed record interest in lifestyle and rural real estate. According to United Country Real Estate, the nation’s largest seller of non-urban real estate, visitor traffic at their over 3,500 websites experienced a dramatic rise in 2012 and early 2013.

“Year-over-year, web traffic at UnitedCountry.com increased each quarter 21, 19, 24 and 33 percent, respectively over 2011’s excellent traffic results,” said David Dickey, chief technology officer for United Country Real Estate. “We received over a million visitors a day each and every month throughout the year, which had not been achieved in the 88-year history of United Country Real Estate.”

According to Dickey, these numbers only reflect traffic for the company’s main website, www.UnitedCountry.com, and does not account for the firm’s other 3,500-plus websites.

“When you include the performance of our other property marketing sites, we capture over 3,000,000 visitors per month – dwarfing the performance of all other major real estate brands on a per-listing, per-office and per-agent basis, and putting lifestyle and rural real estate traffic on the level of leading, primarily urban residential sites, such as Zillow and Trulia,” said Dan Duffy, chief executive officer of United Country Real Estate.

This increase in web traffic was also reflected in strong gains in real estate sales for the company. United Country’s sales volume experienced a dramatic rise in 2012, resulting in a 27.6-percent increase in annual sales volumes versus 2011.

“While we are pleased by a solid performance for the 2012 calendar year, we are especially excited about our growth in closed sales of larger ‘investment grade’ farm, ranch, recreational and timberland properties with sale values ranging from $1 million to $50 million,” said Duffy. “In addition to this over 40 percent increase in land sales, we have seen resurgence in sales of residential homes in the smaller city and towns we serve, which grew by over 12 percent. We also viewed large gains in residential auction sales – 41 percent better than 2011 – as this marketing method continues to gain in popularity.”

Read more at http://www.unitedcountry.com/aboutus/pressreleases/ruralrealestate-webtraffic.htm