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Online Home Searches Continue to Grow
By Vinny | June 6, 2007
Most real estate professionals in the know agree that online marketing is not only a good idea, it’s vital to the survival of the business. In November of 2006, The National Association of Realtors (NAR) used the NAR Conference and Expo to release loads of data about online search behavior and budgets. From the Realtor.org article entitled Survey Shows Buyers And Sellers Use Technology And Want Personal Services:
“Buyers used a wide array of resources in searching for a home: 85 percent used a real estate agent, 80 percent the Internet (up from 77 percent in 2005), 63 percent yard signs, 55 percent print or newspaper ads and 47 percent attended open houses. Smaller categories include a home book or magazine, home builders, television, billboards and relocation companies.”
Basically, 8 out of 10 people started their home search on the Internet. This number continues to grow in 2007. Furthermore, most people conducting home searches are looking to work with an agent. This is why it is so critical to build an online marketing strategy that not only attracts searchers to your online tools (MLS search, website property search, etc.) but also to what makes you and your business unique. People still prefer to work with people.
Marketing research association, ClickZ.com, estimates that online advertising for real estate will double by the year 2010. They report:
This means that most real estate professionals polled are still not using online advertising methods even though research clearly shows that their potential clients are increasingly using the Internet to begin their home searches. The good news is, there is still plenty of time to get over to the winning team before inflation prices many realtors out of the online advertising market.
I’ve observed many realtors continuing to pour advertising dollars into newspaper ads, real estate magazines, billboards and bus bench ads. I wouldn’t recommend ceasing those methods entirely, as long as they are working for you right now. But it’s vital to allocated more of the budget than ever before to online advertising. Media Post Publications notes “that much of the growth in online real estate ad spending will come at expense of newspapers. This year, real estate ads in newspapers are predicted to total $4.327 billion–down almost 8 percent from last year’s estimated $4.682 billion.”
Many realtors who have been in the business for many years fall into a rut by telling themselves, “traditional advertising has always worked before, why fix something that’s not broken?” ClickZ’s research says that there is “a disparity between long-time agents and those who are relatively new to the industry. It showed that 36 percent of those who have been agents 10 years or longer use online advertising, while 64 percent of those in the business for 10 years or fewer buy online ads. Seventy-one percent of those less-experienced agents will boost their Web ad budgets this year compared to 48 percent of their veteran counterparts. The agents with longer histories in the industry, opined Conti, “are going to lose out pretty soon” because more and more people entering the market are using the Web to find their next home.”
Essentially, realtors who are new to the real estate game are allocating larger amounts of advertising dollars to things like online lead generation systems and natural search engine marketing. Considering that less experienced realtors are dominating online advertising, I think there is a vast untapped resource available to experienced and talented real estate agents and brokers. Your future clients are looking for you.
What do you think? Do you still receive leads from traditional methods of marketing, or do you find that a dollar’s worth of newspaper ads doesn’t go as far as it used to?
Are you new to real estate? What have you tried that’s worked?
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Topics: Traditional vs. Online Marketing |