Last year was nothing short of a roller coaster from start to finish. We launched in February as the pandemic was taking shape, so our rollout pivoted from conferences to screen shares. COVID also impacted interest in land and rural living. According to Google Trends, "land for sale" search volume more than doubled from mid-March to the end of the year. That increase in demand is also responsible for a large dip in our inventory, with a decline of 100,000 listings from a year ago.
Despite the general chaos we had a very productive year, having delivered leads to thousand of agents across the country and helped market millions of acres of land. We've already delivered on our promise of being the most forward-thinking land marketplace, and we're just getting started.
Rapid traffic and lead growth
We've delivered tens of thousands of leads to brokers around the country since launch, with each week bringing new traffic records. Organic traffic in particular, has been on the rise, having doubled since November. We already reach hundreds of thousand of land buyers every month but are working towards millions.
Major improvements
We've been busy, having published hundreds of updates across 8 major releases. Here are some highlights.
- Added a 3D mapping view for realistic terrain display
- Made huge performance improvements across the board
- Introduced XML profile feeding and new detailed profile fields
- Improved autocompletion with improved relevancy and typo tolerance
- Redesigned the approach to mobile map property previews
- Added high-level stats to location-based property listing pages
- Added support for Matterport virtual tour embeds
- Improved the layout of property previews and detail pages
- Added scrollable thumbnail galleries to property detail pages
- Enabled fullscreen enlargement from any map view
- Added the ability to overlay value-add layers to the map
Promotion opportunities
One thing we heard loud and clear from brokers was the desire for more seller leads. As a result, we've increased visibility for featured brokers through agent recommendations on the homepage and property results. We also saw the need for single-listing promotion, so we added a new advertising option.
We've also built out the ability to serve deeply-integrated display ads within the core pages of the site. These ads can target users by tag, type, and detailed location. We'll be rolling this out to advertisers this quarter on a first-come, first-served basis, so if you're interested, let us know.
What comes next
I'm excited about this year and continuing our momentum. We still have a lot of work to do on our core platform, but also a long list of features and marketing goals on our roadmap. We'd love to hear what you'd like to see from us in 2021.