You're absolutely right that both PropertyGuru and iProperty will only tell you the metrics that are going their way. In fact, the "time on site" metric can be interpreted in two ways. If time on site goes up the message is that it's because people are engaged and are viewing more listings. However, if it goes down the message is that people are finding the property they want faster so they don't need to spend as much time! (Personally I buy the first one - more time on site is better).
On the Hong Kong front, the additional layer I'd add is the traffic sources. Squarefoot have a slightly higher percentage of traffic coming from paid search (google adwords) than GoHome which is generally a bad thing. However, that metric only comes from Google - for HK sites, Baidu is also an important traffic source.
If you look at the organic search keywords you'll see that "squarefoot" is the fourth and sixth ranked terms. For GoHome, it's first and second. To me that indicates that the brand awareness for GoHome is higher than it is for Squarefoot - because people are searching for the site's name and not a generic term.
IPP Price at posting:
$1.93 Sentiment: None Disclosure: Held
