PropertyChat is 4 years old!

26. Email domains of registered users



Stripped out the top level domain (TLD) so that yahoo.com and yahoo.com.au results (and all the other TLDs they use) are combined.

"Over 48% of users on PropertyChat use Gmail"

 

14. Posts per user per day (28 day moving average)

"On average, how many posts does each user make per day?"

 

15. Posts per user per month

"On average, how many posts does each user make per month?"

 

16. Posts per user per year

"On average, how many posts does each user make per year?"



This is an interesting chart.

At first glance it indicates a severe drop in posts - but that's only half the story.

If we look at the earlier chart, Posting Users per Year - it shows that the number of users who post each year has been increasing:

View attachment 35374

... so while overall post count has dropped, the number of posters who are posting has risen - so the posts per user would be expected to drop quite significantly. This is actually a good thing - more diversity is great.

 

25. Age distribution of members (as at anniversary date: 18th June)



Median age of members: 37

Members with a date of birth entered in their user profile: 621

 

19. Posts per day - popular topics (90 day moving averages)

Our three most popular topics - Where to Buy vs Property Market Economics vs Property Finance



Notice the impact that APRA has had on finance discussions since mid-2017!

We're also missing all the newbs asking all the questions about Where to Buy ... there's been a definite downtrend in sentiment.

Here was my post from Jan 2019 discussing these stats at that point in time: PropertyChat 2018 stats

If we look at the same data taken as a percentage of the total posts (to account for overall changes in post volume), the decrease in Where to Buy vs the increase in Property Market Economics discussions is even more apparent:

 

20. Posts per day mentioning APRA (90 day moving averages)



We've seen a bit of a decline in the amount of talk about APRA, but it's still obviously having an impact - significantly above the 2016 lows yet.

 

5. Threads per day (28 day moving averages)

 

6. Threads per month

 

7. Threads per year

 

Has there been much of an increase in share discussion posts in the InvestChat area, possibly at the expense of property related posts?

Posts in Politics have gone way down, but I'm guessing that they were a very small proportion of total posts.

 

Good question - I'll add that to the list of charts to generate.

Well, partly because we banned all discussion about US politics and their president - but also, we're less than 12 months past the last AU election and I can't recall a single thing the current govt has actually done?

We tend to get more political discussion around election times.

 

There is a small group of contributors who have made an immensely valuable contribution.

 

17. Posts per day - top 50% of posters vs the rest (28 day moving averages)

I've previously tried looking at the breakdown of posters using an approximation of the 80/20 rule (20% of the posters generate 80% of the content) - but found that the patterns largely just followed the overall post volume and didn't give us any new insights.

So this time, I decided to look at comparing activity between the top posters vs the rest - split right down the middle.

I started by investigating which members contribute the majority of the posts. Here's what I found:

• From launch to our 4th anniversary, we've had 9,153 members post on PropertyChat
• In that same period, we made 697,219 posts
• I found that 84 members made 50% of the posts - that's 0.92% of the members making 50% of the posts
• In summary: if you have made at least 1,588 posts then you are in the top 50% of posters, if we measure it by contribution to the overall post total

So let's compare those two groups: 84 members in the top 50% vs 9,069 members in the bottom 50%:



This is kind of interesting - and not what I initially expected. If we consider the "bottom 50%" to be mostly made up of new members and new investors, then I would have expected a fairly significant drop in post volume in recent years as investor sentiment seems to have waned.

However, that's not what we're seeing - yes, post volumes are down, but not by as much as from the top 50% of members. It seems that our newer members are driving the post volume now - and as we've seen from other charts, the diversity of posters is increasing, which is a good thing.

Here's another view of the data where I look at the percentage difference between the posts made by the top 50% vs the rest of posters.



This more clearly shows which group is making the most posts. Interestingly, during the 2017 peak in posting activity, the activity is fairly evenly split. But before then (boom period?) it was the top posters driving activity, and since then (downturn?) it has been the bottom 50% driving the post activity.

So we're seeing a few of our previously top posters go a bit quiet in recent years. APRA has had a huge impact - but also the uncertainty in the leadup to the last federal election also played a part.

Given these stats are from launch - we also have to consider that some of our more active members earlier on are no longer active - and a few are no longer as active as they were.

Two examples of no longer active top members come to mind - @Azazel was extremely active in the first 18 months of the site (even if he didn't exactly add a lot of value with his frequent short posts) but has not posted since early Nov 2016. Despite this, he remains our 10th highest poster! If he had continued with the same post rate, he would had added over 15,000 posts to our total up until our 4th anniversary and would be well above @Terry_w in post count (but no doubt well short of Terry's word count!!)

The second example is @Xenia, who posted a lot in the early days, but then stepped away in mid-2018 citing work commitments. Despite not posting at all during the last 12 months up until our 4th anniversary, Xenia remains our 27th top poster.

One thing to keep in mind with these stats is that the user population is not static and indeed changes on a daily basis as new members register. Given the cutoff to be in the top 50% of members was 1,588 posts as of our 4th anniversary - it would take any new member a while to get to that level. Even Azazel or Terry take nearly 4 months to post that many posts! The point being that members who have been here longer are more likely to be a part of the top 50% because they've had more time to make their posts.

Breaking it down on a year-by-year basis would also be interesting (and more clearly show the changing dynamic) - including what percentage of posters contributed to 50% of the posts in that year.

 

I understand why the political discussions all but ceased. Looking at the size of the threads, the politics forum was tiny, even at its busiest period. Shares however is a different story - one discussion had almost 3800 replies, and that was a discussion only relaying to 2019.

 

18. Posts per day - Property vs Shares (28 day moving averages)



This chart clearly shows that share discussion (as a percentage of overall discussion on the site) has increased - but that doesn't really seem to be at the expense of property discussion, which has remained remarkably consistent over time.

There does seem to be less "off topic" discussion in Living Room these days.