It may be the fact that today’s St Patrick’s Day, but I am inspired to write a post on green issues in the real estate industry.
I was standing in line at the local Post Shop just now watching as someone came in to empty their post box. Struggling to extract the mass of ‘marketing flyers’ from local real estate agents she proceeded to unceremoniously dump all of them in the bin – a bin that was as you can see from this camera phone image (apologies for a shaky image) was already straining at the seams with yet more of these real estate flyers!
The real question here is – does the real estate industry realise how damaging this mass of wasted marketing material is to the environment?
I undertook a quick guesstimate of the impact of all of these flyers being dumped in rubbish bins – in a week. I estimate that based on 17,000 real estate agents in NZ the industry produces over 34 tons of paper (this excludes magazines and newspapers – just mail dropped flyers) per week!
Now courtesy of an online green calculator I found out that to produce this mass of paper uses up 816 trees per week – 42,000 trees per annum.
Now we are a real estate website so you may think we have a slight agenda here – we do!
We want to assist the property buying and selling public by providing the most valuable and effective means of searching for property of all types. You might also think that with the growth of the web as the preferred means of searching for real estate real estate, that agents might realise that random mail drops are neither cost effective nor environmentally friendly!
So next time you get the opportunity and are speaking to a real estate agent you might like to remind them of the impact on the environment that their mail drops is having to our beautiful country. Maybe it is time one or all of the real estate companies decided that going green would be a neat marketing tactic.
As for ourselves I can confirm that we here at realestate.co.nz are going greener – as of the end of this month we will cease to produce and distribute paper forms, invoices, letters and statements – collectively saving this country over a quarter of a ton of paper and allowing 6 more trees to live!