Rent.com.au Limited (ASX: RNT) (“RENT” or “the Company”), Australia’s Number 1 website dedicated to rental property, achieved more than 610,000 unique visitors to the website during February 2016 while also continuing to increase agent and landlord registrations in line with its content targets.
Key Statistics:
610,523 unique visitors (“UV’s”) to the site in February 2016
Continued strong user engagement metrics
Now more than 6,800 real estate agents registered with RENT
Highest number of new landlord listings in a month (19x increase in six months)
National field sales team deployment completed
RENT Managing Director, Mark Woschnak, said the February UV traffic result was in line with Company expectations, representing sustained growth over January on a per day basis.
“While strong UV numbers are important and demonstrate an increase in the awareness of RENT, we arepleased with the launch of the national sales team ahead of schedule and continued gains made in agent and non‐agent registrations during the month of February.
“We now have an on the ground agent sales presence right across the country and we are set to benefit from this continued increase in agent registrations.
In addition to that, we have also had our biggest month yet for landlord listings,” said Mr Woschnak.
“Importantly, our engaged audience is delivering to agents and landlords exactly what they most want from Rent.com.au, which is an increasing level of inquiries on the properties they advertise.”
Upon achieving its initial goal of growing its unique audience to above 500,000 UV’s, the Company has commenced its next phase of growth which involves:
Growing listings from agents who are not yet using the site;
Continuing to shift the private landlord market to online at www.rent.com.au;
Completing the roll out of a national sales team;
Continued innovation in user experience and product development; and
Preparing the next phase of the national branding campaign.
Mr Woschnak commented: “Over the coming months we are focusing our resources on driving faster growth in agent and non‐agent registrations as we look to increase our overall level of listings content from the approximately 80 per cent of national property listings that we currently have on site.
This growing content base will in turn help us attract an even larger audience, providing greater benefits for all industry participants and empowering our sales efforts.
With a business development manager and telesales team already focused on the non‐agent market, RENT achieved a new record of almost 1,300 new landlord listings in February.
Although this was still only a small proportion of the available market, it reflected increasing traction in the large, untapped non‐agent market in Australia.
While the current focus was on increasing listings content, RENT was still pursuing its other objectives of continued innovation, user experience and preparation for the offline/mainstream phase of its national branding campaign.
“We are maintaining excellent site metrics across a range of measures such as property inquiries, time on site and views per property,” said Mr Woschnak.
