Realtor.com, long the largest Internet real estate site in terms of visitors and listings, has now lost at least part of its crown to HomeStore.com.

The latest figures from January, 2000 to January, 2001 from Media Metrix, an independent Internet research firm, show that HomeStore.com dominated the real estate category with 3.28 million visitors in January versus 2.52 million for Realtor.com. HomeAdvisor was third with 1.85 million visitors.

Meanwhile, the real estate sector shows strong growth as the percentage of visitors who go to realty sites continues to increase when compared with overall Web usage.

During December, 1999, Media Metrix says that unique online visitors amounted to 65 million people and traffic to realty sites represented 7.3 percent of the total.

By December, 2000, realty sites accounted for 9.6 percent of all online visitors. Web usage in January, according to the survey, totaled 82.9 million unique visitors while realty sites as a group had 9.88 million visitors, or 11.9 percent of the total.

Unique visitors, says Media Metrix, are "the number of total users who visited the reported Web site or online property at least once in the given month. All unique visitors are unduplicated (only counted once)." The sample size included more than 60,000 individuals nationwide.

For more articles by Peter G. Miller, please press here

Published: February 23, 2001

Use of this article without permission is a violation of federal copyright laws.

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Peter G. Miller, also known as OurBroker®, is the author of six real estate books -- including The Common-Sense Mortgage -- and is the original creator and host of America Online's Real Estate Center. Peter's weekly columns appear in more than 100 newspapers nationwide, he is also published in a variety of other media outlets and he is a frequent speaker at national events and conventions. Peter welcomes your questions, comments, and news releases via e-mail at .

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