December is usually the slowest month for real estate activity. And in the current depressed market, one would expect unique visitors to real estate Web sites to be as low as they could go.

Apparently not so at Zillow. The company reported on its blog that it recorded its highest ever traffic last month: 5.8 million unique visitors, a whopping 62 percent increase over December 2007.

Zillow’s VP communications Amy Bohutinsky ventured that with all the uncertainty surrounding the housing market, people are searching for information and answers. That’s a coded way of saying the new Zillow Advice feature seems to be working.

December was also a month for record drops in mortgage rates. As a result, loan requests in the Zillow Mortgage Marketplace shot up 162 percent over November, with more than 22,000 consumer loan requests.

Let’s hope that we hear more good news from all the real estate sites we cover in 2009.