Each year around this time there is heated anticipation for the release of the annual Nielsen Real Estate Market Report. This comprehensive survey of property buyers and sellers has become a seminal guidebook to the trends in real estate as it has been undertaken in each of the past 4 years.
The survey (which is undertaken through an online survey) covers many aspects of consumer behaviour, attitudes and awareness of the industry and each year new insights and critical trends emerge.
This year one chart from the amongst one hundred pages of the report leaped out and said in a confident and striking manner – LOOK AT ME!
A total of 1,206 people were asked the question:
“Thinking about the different media and other things that you consult for the purpose of researching real estate, how useful do you perceive the following?”
The respondents were shown a list of 14 sources of real estate information – everything from TV and real estate office window displays to magazines, newspapers and the web, in all their different forms. The respondents were then asked to rate each by how useful they though each was. The chart below compares the 2 major competing media – newspapers and specialist real estate websites.

The results are staggering with 95% of people saying that specialist real estate websites were “useful or very useful” as compared to just 49% for newspapers – taking the judgement of “very useful”; less than 1 in 10 judged newspapers as “very useful”, whereas with specialist real estate websites 2 out of 3 judged them “very useful”.
Evaluating all of the 14 media options as to how many had been consulted in the past week equally startling trends emerged, comparing this year to last year.

Right up at the top of the list is specialist real estate websites; up from 69% last year to 78% this year. Other web options of company websites and search engines showed growth at 63% and 38% respectively.
However the print versions of real estate saw significant declines. Specialist magazines remain relevant although falling from 55% to just 46%. Local newspapers fell from 49% to 40% and then far behind was national / metropolitan newspapers down from 43% last year to just 31% this year – this means that now less than a third of all property researchers surveyed consulted metropolitan newspapers in the past week.
These figures are in some ways not that alarming as the rise in traffic to real estate websites has been enormous over the past few years, however despite this and despite the behaviour of buyers and sellers in using the web as the primary means of researching real estate – the real estate industry still has a love affair with printed publications, demonstrated by the colossal scale of investment of vendors money in print media, with so little relatively being placed in online media advertising of property.
I can’t help recounting a moment sitting just last month listening to a panel discussion at the Inman Connect Conference in San Francisco. I was not surprised. Nor were any of my fellow participants. One after another real estate agents shared their approach to marketing-about both marketing of themselves and of their clients’ properties. Not one of them mentioned newspapers. There are some agents in NZ who share this ethos and maybe in time we will see more; however I think the onus may need to come from property sellers to share their view on the appropriateness of online vs. offline when it comes to vendor-paid-marketing.
Update 25 September : pdf copies of these charts are downloadable here – Usefulness of different media and used in the last week.