Online foreclosure listings can be a portal to real estate deals, and companies that run such sites said Web traffic is growing steadily.
One national site, RealtyTrac.com, said it is getting about 3.5 million unique Web visits per month this year, up from 2.7 million per month last year.
There were about 1 million visitors per month in 2004, the year the company began tracking its Web traffic. “We did see a fairly big bounce in our traffic in 2008,” a spokesman for the company said. “But we were going up just as fast when the market was doing well.”
But other sites are recognizing the value of online foreclosure listings. This past July, Zillow.com launched its own online foreclosure listings. In October, the company reported 5.5 million visitors logged onto its site, a 38 percent increase from the year before.
Bill Staniford, the CEO of Property-Shark.com, which has foreclosure listings, said access to information about distressed properties could help to improve the market.
“To the extent that companies or individuals can start making more short sales, and identifying more efficiently which properties those are that can be sold in a short sale, it is going to help the recession along very quickly,” he said. “The Internet can help short sales just by trying to provide information.”