PropertyChat is 4 years old!

Ha! No, I was a bit older than that when I started. I had already bought a house (in Adelaide) and paid it off (in under 3 years) when I started looking at "what's next?" and discovered Jan Somers' books on property investing and then the Somersoft forums.

 

8. New user registrations per day (28 day moving average)

Note that this shows only "valid" users - meaning all deleted, spam banned or never activated accounts are not included. The actual number of registrations per day is quite a bit higher - but we only count valid users.

I've started the chart as of the 1st August 2015, because the initial rush of registrations as people migrated across from Somersoft warps the chart and makes it difficult to see the detail in later years.

 

9. New user registrations per month - valid users only

 

Absolutely - the psychological impact of APRA was the key thing - investor sentiment changed dramatically. You just have to look at the stats showing lending to investors vs owner occupiers in recent years. OO loan growth is up significantly, while investor loan growth is only up a little (no doubt this will improve over time).

From CBA:


This seems to be backed up by anecdotal evidence I've heard from brokers and buyers agents that until recently, most of their business was coming from OO rather than investors. I think it's only in the last 6 months (certainly post-election) that investor sentiment has started to improve again.

I know what you mean - some of the large meetups I went to at Wentys and Sharks were full of zero IP newbs. These days I find that you will often get a couple of people new to investing, but the vast majority of people at meetups definitely have at least one IP - most are actually quite experienced.

I'd give it a go - I think you'll find it rewarding.

 

Decided to measure these "per year" stats differently and do "anniversary year", ie the first 12 months since launch, the 2nd 12 months since launch, etc.

So the following chart shows posts from 18/06/2015 - 17/06/2016 in the first column, then posts from 18/06/2016 - 17/06/2017 in the second column and so on:

4. Posts per year



What I find curious is that despite the posts per year dropping quite significantly since our first year - the visitor stats I get from Google Analytics does not match this, with our monthly unique visitor statistics still being as strong as they've been since the peak back in Mar-May 2017.

Page views per month is down perhaps 25% from the peak towards the end of 2019, but unique visitors has been pretty steady since 2017 through to now.

The volume of visits resulting from organic searches (ie Google searches) has been pretty much constant for nearly 3 years now - so there's plenty of people searching for information, even if they aren't sticking around much afterwards.

 

Ha

 

10. New user registrations per year - valid users only

 

24a. User status

• Valid: account is fully active and the user can post (this number is shown as the "total users" count you see in the sidebar)
• Invalid: account is suspended because the user either has not confirmed their email address; emails sent to them have bounced back as undeliverable; the user requested that their account be disabled; or they changed their email address but never verified it
• Banned: account has been disabled because the user was either banned for spamming, or banned for rule violations. Note the percentage doesn't show on the pie chart - it is 1.5% of total user registrations.
  
• Removed: accounts have been purged from the database because they were either invalid or banned and never posted. Purges happen only periodically, so over time more of the invalid and banned (because of spam) users will be removed.

If we break down the valid users and compare users who have posted vs those who haven't, we get the following:

24b. Valid users

• Active: valid and has posted
• Never posted: can post, but hasn't

I was a little surprised at this. Over half of our users who can post, have done so at least once! I thought the figure would be lower.


We can also break down the invalid users:

24c. Invalid users

• Email bounced: we received notification from our email service provider that mail was permanently undeliverable to this user (ie was never a valid email address; email address is no longer valid; user has blocked us; user made a spam complaint against us; our email service provider blocks us from sending to that address)
• Incomplete Registration: user never confirmed their email address after registering
• Account Disabled: user voluntarily requested us to disable their account
• Never logged in: user has never logged in again since registering and never completed registration
• Email Changed: user changed their email address but did not confirm the new address

 

23. Active users per day (28 day moving average)



"By the end of June 2019, there was an average of over 700 active users each day who logged in to PropertyChat"

 

11. Posting users per day (28 day moving average)

"How many unique members posted each day?"

 

12. Posting users per month

"How many unique members posted each month?"



"In May 2017, there were posts made by more than 1,100 different members on PropertyChat"

 

13. Posting users per year



"In 2017-18, there were posts made by over 4,000 different members on PropertyChat"

 

28. Most popular themes (other than the default, which is used by nearly 98% of users)



Note that "Blue Theme" is actually the default theme - the users showing up in this chart using that theme have explicitly selected it (most likely after trying other themes) rather than the majority of users who have not chosen a theme at all (and thus get Blue Theme by default).