NAR Survey Says What about Mobile?
NAR came out with their 2014 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers yesterday.
Mobile usage was an eye opener at 50%, but wait, upon closer inspection, they classify it as a Mobile or tablet website or application.
I don’t have permission to post a chart from their survey, so here is the link to it on Inman News.
I don’t know about you, but when I use my tablet, I browse the full size website, not the one optimized for a phone. At first glance you might think 50% of these users are spending most of their time on their phone browsing for a home, but NAR does not break it down.
Maybe out of the 50% NAR classifies as Mobile, 50% are on a tablet, so then it is only 25% are using a phone to browse Real Estate Websites.
Also, on my Website, according to Google Analytics, I had 1,082,000 page views in the last 30 days. My Mobile website received only 2,074 page views, so less than .2 percent used it. However, Google says 31% of my sessions are from a mobile phone, not a tablet or desktop, so even saying someone used a phone to browse your website, does not mean they browsed your mobile website.
If anyone wants to share their mobile website stats in the comments or their thoughts on mobile phone usage please do. This NAR survey is interesting, but it is hard to tell from it who is really using their phone to find homes.
Lyn Sims
Posted at 06:43h, 05 NovemberThis is really a great point that I have also thought about. There has been the push that ‘mobile’ is the up & coming platform so it
should have be broken down to be an effective study.
Lyn Sims RE/MAX Suburban Schaumburg IL
Bryn Kaufman
Posted at 07:54h, 05 NovemberThanks Lyn, glad you see my point.
I am not sure if any of the big portals release their mobile phone site usage vs. their desktop site. If anyone knows it would be interesting data to know.
To me the bottom line is how many people are using your mobile site. A tablet using the desktop site and a mobile phone using your desktop site are not mobile website usage.
Bryn Kaufman
Posted at 11:57h, 05 NovemberIMO responsive design still requires multiple websites. They might have the same URL, but you would detect the browser size and adjust things accordingly.
The other option if you want things to fit automatically is to scale down the features on your regular site, but then no one will want to use it because it starts to feel like a large mobile site.
One of my clients told me that he never uses the mobile sites or apps as they all are missing many features. He just uses the full size site on his phone and is used to moving around and zooming in and out as needed. I have a feeling he is not alone, and a lot of people do the same. They certainly do that on my website as shown by the stats I mention in my post.
Your example above looks great on my Desktop, and would not load on my iPhone. I even rebooted and it still would not load. I did a speed test on the iPhone and I am downloading at 13 Megabits, so plenty fast enough to watch a HD movie, never mind load a website. Other websites including mine loaded fine, so their responsive design is not responsive on an iPhone.
Bryn Kaufman
Posted at 15:07h, 05 NovemberThat one looks good, and it is done by Placeter too, which Drew just posted about. That is a nice looking $10 per month website.
I just looked closely at my site on an iPhone and there are views that incorporate responsive design, so I assume clients have found these views and that is how they are using it.
Thanks for the feedback too, it got me looking at my site closer on the phone and I realized I have some easy changes I can make that will help a lot.
SloveniaInvest
Posted at 04:57h, 07 NovemberThanks a lot for sharing this nice article,