A quick look at Zillow’s latest stats offer more confirmation of the movement toward mobile devices.
The Seattle online real estate company saw record usage with its array of mobile apps in 2013, as more than 60 percent of Zillow’s visits came from a mobile device, with weekend traffic topping more than 70 percent.
Home shoppers spent more than five billion minutes on Zillow’s 27 apps and viewed homes more than 2.5 billion times, up 150 percent from 2012.
Zillow has invested several resources into its mobile products in the past couple of years as more and more people use their smartphones and tablets to browse properties. Last year, CEO Spencer Rascoff spoke about the success his company is having with mobile advertising revenue.
“Now, more homes are viewed on Zillow on a smartphone or tablet, than on a desktop,” he said. “We’ve tipped towards mobile in terms of usage, and I think the bull case on Zillow and the reason why we’ve done well as a stock is we monetize on mobile.”
Zillow last month posted record revenue of $53.3 million for the third quarter, up 67 percent over the same period last year. Even though Zillow swung to a net loss, Rascoff said the results beat Wall Street expectations, which had forecast a loss of eight cents per share.
“We’re in hyper growth mode, and we are focused on running the business to maximize audience growth and revenue growth,” said Rascoff. “This is not the time to be harvesting profits. That will come later.”
Rascoff also noted that Zillow, which recorded 64 million unique users for the month of August, is distancing itself from Trulia and others.
“We are separating from our competitors in terms of traffic, quite significantly,” he said. “For example, we are now twice the size of Trulia on mobile … and four times the size of Realtor.com on mobile. And, at the beginning of 2013, we had 27 percent desktop share of the category, according to comScore, and now we have 34 percent of share.”
Zillow’s stock is up nearly 200 percent in 2013 alone.
