The Future of Local Real Estate Advertising is Global
Many of you may have commented on the obvious change to the SKY Sotheby’s display ad in Sunday’s Herald Tribune. This change is the start of a concerted effort to migrate away from the use of the daily newspaper as a vehicle to promote every single listing.
We believe that it is in the best interest of our home sellers to get in step with the fact that affluent home buyers are starting their search on the web. In fact, in the latest numbers published by the National Association of Realtors®, 77% of all home buyers report starting the buying process via the web.
A report created by Borrell and Associates http://www.borrellassociates.com/product.cfm?prodID=55 and Dunn & Bradstreet forecasts the effect on real estate advertising as a result predicting an increase in online advertising by almost 50% and the decrease in newspaper spending by almost one third.
Prior to making this move, we studied all of our inbound leads over that last 14 months utilizing the powerful Lead Router™ platform. Despite advertising every single listing in the Sunday paper for 52 straight weeks, only 1.7% of our total leads were generated from the Sunday display ad. After compiling and studying this information, we met with all of our current home sellers to explain our findings and our strategy to market their properties which meant a move away from one big display ad and more targeted programs to market their specific property.
This change does not mean the end to all of our print media buys! Rather, we now have the ability to optimize our media spending with the most effective print media platforms including the global print run of the Wall Street Journal as well as many local papers including The Herald Tribune Classifieds, The Longboat Observer, Pelican Press and Anna Maria Islander.
While it would be easy to continue with the status quo, continuing to run the same ineffective ad is a complete copout and not the right thing to do for our customers. Today’s market demands more sophisticated multi media advertising programs and not simply using the same techniques that worked 20 years ago.
Your observations and comments are spot on. Where you seem to be ahead of the pack is sharing this with your sellers.
Armed with the knowledge that over 75% of buyers start on the internet — what is the next step? The cost of internet marketing is sky (no pun intended) rocketing. Internet marketing far from being a science is still in the “see what sticks” stage.
The statistics eminating from web service providers are still too oblique. What I want to know is did some one look at my listing and for how long — not that it was one of 50 that fit a profile, ergo it was a viewing.
For the market we service the internet is claerly our future — worldwide marketing. We cannot wait for buyers to come to us.
Good article.