Every now and then when we meet with potential investors, a skeptical venture capitalist will ask: “But how is the housing crisis going to affect your forecasts? There’ll be fewer agencies, and they’ll have lower budgets. Isn’t this the wrong time to start a real estate site?”

Good argument, but the evidence seems to suggest the contrary.

Various sources, including El Pais, printed a press release last week based on a study from “Construcción Alimarket” noting that real estate portals and search engines are receiving approximately 13.82 million visits per month, which is a 63% increase relative to the same time last year, despite the fact that real estate sales are dramatically and notoriously down in Spain. Real estate agencies are closing their doors in droves, but the public still keeps looking for their dream homes and increasingly they are doing more of their searches online, driven by the dual facts that online searches are more convenient and that more agencies are diminishing their offline presence in favour of a more robust online campaign. The release also notes that 8 new portals will be launched this year in Spain, and each is projecting user traffic of about 600.000 monthly visits.

It’s simple to understand why agents would increasingly move their marketing campaigns online. The move online is part of a larger global trend across industries, but the fact that real estate agencies have increasingly more limited advertising budgets means that return on investment is a key consideration, and online portals and search engines generally offer a better return on investment than traditional newspapers. Relatedly, an online campaign is often a lot cheaper than publishing ads in newspapers.

One final point is that the analysis suggests that the Spanish online real estate market is far from consolidated, particularly if you compare the market shares of Spanish market leaders to those of their French, German and UK counterparts. Idealista, for example, is the Spanish market leader with a 9.4% market share (1.3 million monthly visits). Fotocasa is second with a 8.7% market share (1.2 million monthly visits), while Yaencontré is third with an 8.4% market share (1 million monthly visits).

Spanish online real estate is arguably still in its infancy (relative to other developed nations), and this is good news for all market players.

In our case, it suggests that there is still ample room for new kids on the block like nuroa.