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.
Alistair.
Do you mind if I put this onto our News on line. (Acknowledgement realestate.co.nz of course). It’s great information and could ultimately reduce RE selling costs in NZ significantly.
John Christiansen
Principal
Taranaki Harcourts
John
Delighted for you to share this information far and wide – as with any content on this blog. The content is freely able to be copied and distributed – all I ask is a reference to the source and if published online, a link back to the blog post.
More details from the Nielsen Survey will be published later today.
I cannot see any logical reason for the real estate industry to continue with the use of expensive full colour print media advertising, other than to push the brand profile of the various real estate franchise groups.
So far this year in my office most of our homes have taken less than 3 weeks to sell, most had multiple offers presented and the only marketing required was internet and database oriented and a colour sign with a small script advert under the suburb heading in the NZ Herald.
Last Thursday we launched 3 quality bungalows on the market in the Pt Chevalier and Westmere area. See http://www.sellrealty.co.nz We emailed details of these to our buyer database on Thursday, advertised in the Herald on Saturday and marketed two of the three as feature homes on realestate.co.nz. They appeared on various additional websites and on our blog page. We also advertised them in a local school newsletter and put up a colour sign.
As a result more than 100 people went through each of them at the weekend, multiple offers were presented including some from overseas locations like Dubai and London and all three had sold signs by Sunday night.
If we could secure another 25 to 30 bungalows for sale in the $600,000 to $800,000 range we could sell them all in a week without needing to use any print media!
Within 2 to 3 years time I suspect that full colour print advertising of real estate will be virtually non existent.
It is already very noticeable how several publications have shrunk in size and it will be interesting to see how many sellers this summer opt for print versus internet campaigns.
Great information you have share.It might help some one who needs information regarding usefulness of news paper to real estate research.
I think Murdoch’s decision to to charge for online content of his newspapers is a tacit admission that the physical print media, if not already dead, is terminally ill.
From a real estate perspective it is imperative that we all recognise the importance of the internet and start using tools – such as videos etc – to maximise our clients’ property exposure.
Does the survey cover preference for listings with video tours vs still photos?
Interesting. Looking forward to more info about the nielsen survey, in particular what qualifies as a specialist website and do they provide examples and references?
Thanks for the post.
Debbie Hemley
This should be no surprise. Everyone wakes up every morning to check their e-mail….during their work day most see or use a computer. The internet empowers one with the ability to see what they want to see………The internet is a “buffet” of information and everyone likes whats being served.
Thanks for those responses.
Tim – will be releasing more details from the research in the coming days. It does cover consumer expectations in respect of media and richness of information.
Debbie – for clarification Nielsen use the collective term of “specialist real estate website” to describe websites that are portals – they aggregate content from a wide variety of real estate companies; that being distinct from real estate companies own websites.
For the purpose of this survey there are only 3 specialist real estate websites in NZ – Realestate.co.nz, Trade me property and Open2view.
Flat Rate Realty – your comments are logical and I am sure that 100% of the people reading this blog would agree with you. However within the real estate industry (amongst salespeople and managers) there would be less than a third that would actually “get” this fact – I am not being derogatory, it is something that in my role everyday I see – many people in this industry have as yet not woken up to the power & critical importance of the web as a marketing platform. That is not to say they do not know about it or use it – it is just that they do not think online in anything but an after thought when it comes to marketing campaigns.
The stereotypical marketing pitch to a client is “we will advertise your property in this newspaper on these days, this magazine for these days,we will have open homes on these days, we will post out flyers in this area and email details to my database of buyers, oh and we will put it on the web”!!!!
In our office online is the highest priority and we are always looking at ways to enhance the online experience, for example feature property upgrades are something we always recommend over and above print media.
We have been experimenting with high definition video and as soon as we have that sorted we will be able to offer full motion video clips of all our homes online for as little as $395 incl GST. These will be a walkthrough tour almost the same as a quick open home visit.
This will make it a lot easier for out of town and overseas buyers to get a feel for the property. Combined with Google street view, aerial mapping, floor plans, photos and video and Building, LIM and Title reports all available online we should be able to provide a very full picture of each property before a buyer has physically inspected it.
Then the actual visit will simply be a confirmation that it is the right home to purchase.
Print media has had it’s day and any home seller investing thousands in a full colour print campaign is now wasting their money on something that mainly benefits the agents profile more than it does the house.
When looking for a salesperson to sell your home the first question you should ask is “what online strategies will you employ to get my home sold?”
Alistair – great information.
It tells us quite plainly that NZ is tracking with global trends with web effectiveness incresaing vs the decline/demise of print.
A question – we can clearly see the hits on a particular property, a listing agent can see how many emails he/she has received on a prarticular listing but are subscriptions to RSS feeds and/or email alerts tracked?
Ross – good on ya man…I find that when buyers come through open homes they have all they need to have short-listed properties and then just view before deciding to spend time/money such as builders/LIM’s etc and/or make an offer. Do you find the same in Pt Chev?
Mason,
The data of RSS feeds and email alerts is not added to the stats of views as they do not count as listing views. RSS is an interesting one as there are seldom accurate stats as a feed is active but may never be viewed. I tend to treat it as another link in the chain – valuable but not as accountable as listing click thru’s. It is in many ways similar to Google Adwords – you got 20 click thru’s with a click through rate of 1% – that means the ad was seen 2,000 times – what value was there in the 2,000 views??
We certainly know how many email alerts are set up in aggregate – however like RSS – it is a view of a selection, not until you get click thru do you gain value.
print media advertising is expensive. Why not go into the trend and use real estate internet marketing. You can save time, effort and money.
Mason – I have sold 5 homes totalling $3,160,000 since Friday – multiple cash unconditional offers prseneted as we had most information available that anyone might require. We usually get the LIM upfront so we can make sure there are no problems.
I would like to know how many email alerts go out each week to people who have registered under the my property section of realestate.co.nz
A picture could be painted of how many buyers are registered for properties in each suburb/town – that would be interesting stuff!
Ross,
Completely agree, as with everything in the context of the web the data is endless. The bottom line is this is not something we can publish at this time, but as ever highlighting the benefit of it does drive our priorities.
any chance of supplying these reports as a pdf or printer friendly format so we can use them in our sales pitch to home sellers?
David
Just added pdf versions of these 2 charts to the end of the post. More research data coming out next week. Watch out for industry email alert.
Traffic growth is great but what I am really interested in is conversion rates. Do you have any data across your site in terms of average conversion rates (listing view to agent contact by email)? I would be interested in the property with the most hits, the property with the best conversion rate etc – like a roll of honour.
In general, our office sees the most hits from trademe but the best response from open2view, with realestate.co.nz somewhere in between.
We talk about a “trademe mentality” as a way of trying to describe such a high hit rate with such a low response from real buyers. We think that trademe browsers either have a mindset that is counter productive to selling homes or simply, have an auction open on some product they are bidding on which they are waiting to close and while they wait they flick open trademe property and waste a little time there.
Nowhere is this more noticeable than in our rentals department. Our letting agents were receiving so many low grade emails from people enquiring about listed rental accommodation that they hardly had time to do anything else. A break of about half an hour to have lunch sometimes allowed the buildup of 40 or 50 emails in the inbox. The vast majority of these emails didn’t go anywhere. They were contacted back by the letting agent with the required info and were never heard from again. One letting agent got so exasperated that she took all of her rental listings off trademe and as a result she let twice as many properties in the following months because she wasn’t spending time replying to time wasters.
Fascinating aye!