The internet is radically changing the face of the housing/property market

New figures from Property24.com, one of the biggest property portals in the country, indicate that interest from prospective homebuyers is rapidly rising.

Christo Wiid, general manager of the portal, says the new trend is an increase in the number of visitors perusing the full reports on specific properties, looking for further details about the properties and the agents involved.

In July 523 838 visitors opened up full reports, compared with 461 021 in January.

More and more prospective homebuyers are nowadays first logging onto the Web in their search for the ideal house.

SHOOT: I can confirm from my experience and the stats I've seen, that property online is HA YUGE.

clipped from www.fin24.com Foreign buyers, too, are increasingly using the internet to investigate residential markets in other countries. There are even some who buy without physically seeing the property. They blindly trust the websites that offer instant access to an enormous variety of properties as well as a wealth of information to help prospective purchasers in their buying decisions. For foreign prospective buyers this is a convenient and quick way to investigate the housing market in every country, explains Andrew Golding, chief executive of Pam Golding Estates (PGE). In the seven months to end-July PGE sold properties worth R440m, with an average purchase price of R3.5m, to foreigners. Of these sales, 55% were the result of enquiries via the company's website. PGE, which has a relationship with British property giant Savills, receives 100 000 unique visitors from 176 countries on its website every month.