How to Reach Buyers in Today’s Market 

With an abundance of houses for sale and buyers still weary to return to the housing market, it is now more important than ever before that real estate agents improve their marketing, says the new, 170 page 2008 Swanepoel Trends Report from RealSure Publishing.  In Trend 3, titled ‘The New Digital Currency,’ the Report provides numerous statistics and information showing the shifting patterns of today’s home buyers.  

The action on the local media battlefield has certainly shifted to the Web.  Newspapers are scrambling to make up losses in classified advertising.  TV stations are scrambling to cover declines in automotive and political ads.  Radio operators are worried about a future in which audio programming comes from computer speakers and iPods instead of radios.  And yellow page directories are finally getting serious about trying to stop the migration of business look-ups to the Web as Google and Yahoo add local addresses and phone numbers to search results. 

U.S. local online advertising was projected to hit $7.5 billion in 2007, growing at a clip of 31.5% over 2006 and rising to the number two position behind century old newspaper advertising that is on the verge of losing its number one slot next year – note the way they lined up based on their share:

·          Newspapers - 35.9% of all locally spent advertising.

·          Pure-play Internet companies (Google, Yahoo, Monster etc.) - 33.2%.

·          Yellow pages operators control - 11.7%.

·          Other Print (e.g., Homes & Land and other local magazines) - 9.2%.

·          TV stations - 7.7%.

·          Radio stations - 2.2% 

So with web traffic that has already replaced walk-in-traffic and now is in the verge of replacing newspaper traffic, agent’s websites have become a vital link in the marketing road to success.  

The more effort agents put into improving the quality of their web content and building up the ranking of their websites, the more likely they will produce more and better quality leads and sales.  So at the end of the day, it’s still all about information and content with the listing remaining the key to the real estate transaction.  Before the Internet’s widespread popularity, real estate brokers and agents basically had three ways in which to promote their listings:  the multiple listing service (MLS), newspapers and home listing magazines.

The web didn’t add just one additional option but now due to the size, scope, reach, complexities and choices available on the web, brokers and agents have a smorgasbord of new options.  Clearly you have your own personal, local and company related websites and on a national level you even have a larger, already impressive, and yes growing, list of national sites.   As a very general rule, agents need to ensure that their websites are “sticky.” In short that means that real estate websites need to be:

·         Unique, local, relevant - content that makes buyers and sellers want to stay on your site.

·         Constantly changing content – at least daily.

·         Visual content - images, podcasts and multimedia.

·         Viral content - content that people can share with others. 

Listings of houses-for-sale should also be exposed to the broadest suitable group of websites, be they aggregators, lead generators, portals and/or syndicator websites. However, before adding any third party website to their marketing campaign, agents must have a good understanding of the diverse types of services, the rights they are granting and the differences in the methods of promoting the listing. For a great visual that illustrates the 10 different levels check out “The Listing Promotion Pyramid” in the Report (download copy of the pyramid here) 

To get your personal copy my latest trends report go to www.RealEstateBooks.org and use the promo code realsure to get a 20% saving and pay no shipping.