Rightmove enjoys record visits on Boxing Day as market resumes

Early figures suggest record numbers of people visited Rightmove just after Christmas, giving renewed hope that the market may step up a gear in 2019. 

Over the weekend between Christmas and New Year, Rightmove tweeted that it enjoyed 25,147,701 pages viewed on Boxing Day. 

Meanwhile figures from the Daily Mail suggest that over two million people trawled through multiple Rightmove listings on Boxing Day, too; the paper claims that in total there were 40m online viewings of homes, compared to 38m on the same day in 2017.

Rightmove started its new advertising campaign on Christmas Day, with the first TV ad airing during the Great British Bake Off festive special. The new ad - which will run across TV, digital and social - will continue into 2019 and shows a father trying to find a brief moment of peace to read. 

The final shots show the family moving to a more spacious home with room for the kids to play, and it even boasts a big enough shed for Dad to escape to for some very much needed peace and quiet – for now.

Zoopla has not yet released its Christmas page view figures but has stated that it enjoyed peak viewing at around 9pm on Boxing Day evening.

It too introduced a new advertising campaign just before the holiday. It featured Debs and Jess, two hermit crabs who are navigating the property market in a continuation of the campaign launched by ZPG in 2017. 

Zoopla commissioned Aardman – the Academy Award winning studio behind Wallace & Gromit – to create the two new CGI animated characters. It forecasts that approximately 90 per cent of ABC1 Adults will see Zoopla’s adverts 12 times over the festive period.

The Mail claims key features sought by would-be buyers searching Rightmove and Zoopla on Boxing Day were ‘garage’, ‘parking’ and ‘detached’ while the most popular region being searched was the south east of England commuter belt.