This morning I went to Google Analytics and pulled out the traffic numbers on our portal villages.com.au for the last month (21 June to 20 July), plus the same month for 12 months ago.
From this chart above you can see that the number of New Users – the number of new people who searched for information about retirement villages in the past month – was 71,618.
That is real people coming for the first time to a dedicated website on retirement villages and retirement communities.
And it is a 7% increase on the 66,913 who made the same search journey 12 months ago.
This is really telling, especially when you consider that most of Victoria has been locked down. We presented this graph last week which shows the impact in SE Victoria.
On top of this, we had approximately 9,000 people returning to the site (80,304 Users) over the month to do more searches.
This increase in traffic demonstrates that there is a new customer considering the village value proposition; your sales and settlements do not have to fall off a cliff if you push hard now.
Consider this. Approximately 23,000 village homes nationally become vacant over 12 months; that is 1,961 new vacancies each month. With 80,304 people thinking of villages, this equates to 42 for every village home that comes on the market. Not bad odds.
The basic wisdom of village sales in normal times is you need 20 customers to make a sale through to settlement.
In really difficult times, you need either three times this number or a far more committed buyer.
The initial results from our DCM 2020 Prospect Profile research tell us post-COVID there is this new committed buyer, led by their children.
The research says three things are required. An offer of security and control. Trust and reassurance. And get the potential resident to the village to open their eyes on how good it is.
Now is the time to go hard, based on decisions made with current data and real tools. Our research program has been designed to provide these, which is why all the peak bodies are supporting it.
Learn more HERE.
