This striking headline comes from the excellent book “What Would Google Do?” by Jeff Jarvis.
It speaks to the reality facing most company’s marketing departments and advertising agencies – the hey day of mass market advertising typified by saturation campaigns on the 3 main media of TV, radio and print are over and replacing it is the era of the ploriferation of niche markets each appealing to a unique targeted group of individuals.
This new landscape which is the web; is where people’s attention is going and with it should be, those companies wanting to talk to these highly targeted audience groups. The trouble is the uptake is slow and the creativity (of targeting) poor.
The latest figures released by the NZ Interactive Advertising Bureau showed that in the 1st 3 months of 2009 $49.26m was spent online an 8% increase on last year. Now put this in the context of the advertising world at large which is being pummelled by the dual impact of the great recession and fast declining readership / viewership.
This makes the online story all the more relevant, especially when you see that the latest data from newspapers showed that they suffering as the largest casualty in the advertising war with an 8% fall.
When it comes to real estate – this industry still seems hell bent on hanging on to newspaper advertising as the lion’s share of spend.
It is only now really taking babys steps towards online for marketing properties, a cautious estimate would put total real estate advertising spend online at around $8m per annum, which would amount to not much more than 7% of the total spend. This despite the fact that 80% of buyers use the web as the #1 source of property information.
The web is the powerhouse of lead generation for real estate. The famous quote from Sami Inkinen highlighted last year is worth repeating:
“I can’t find a single large real estate brokerage firm in 2007 that says print advertising really works….but I can easily name dozens who still spend the majority of their ad budgets on newspapers. It’s like a chain smoker battling lung cancer, while still smoking two packs a day.”
This quote is very reflective of a quote from Jeff Jarvis’s book:
“Advertisers, addicted to one-stop shopping, still spend huge budgets on TV that are way out of proportion to the time the audience spends there versus the time we now spend on the internet. That can’t last forever. Soon, agencies will have to work for a living. Instead of reflexivily buying slots on primetime TV, they will need to put together networks of smaller media with smaller audiences that add up to a critical mass, This approach is harder but more targeted and more efficient. Why advertise diapers on a show I watch – next to my teenage kids – when instead Pamapers can now advertise on mommy blogs?”
How the behaviour of the real estate industry mirrors the approach of advertisers!
I still remain staggered by how easily real estate agents gravitate in a classic reflex manner to print media for advertising listings with no objective data that says this property was seen by x number of people over the parts y number of days.
Compare this to the data on a listing on realestate.co.nz – and as an example have a look at this one – it has been on the market more than a month and in recent weeks has been seen by around 50 people a week, but over the past 10 days when as part of premium featured listings the property has been viewed on average just over 100 times per day. This high profile featuring costs far less than the price of a half page advert for 1 day in newspapers or magazines – our offer is for 14 days – 24 hrs per day!
Could you ask the property magazine or a weekend paper to be able to demonstrate such performance? – you could ask! – but would they be able to provide such information – no!
All they can tell you is that the paper (in total) is read by over x thousand people – that statistics being from a survey undertaken by a research sample some 9 months ago!
It is time for the real estate industry at large to wake up to the power of the web to radically change the landscape of property advertising, especially as it is often the seller of the properrty that actuall pays for that full page advert in the property paper section having been recommended by the selling agent!
What I find most useful with the web vs print is that you can actually quantify the level of enquiry, where it’s coming from, which websites generate the most activity, emails etc.
For the first 6 months of 2009 the only print media we have used in my office is a small script advert in the NZ Herald Saturday liftout listing the address of our properties and the open home times and of course our web address.
On the other hand all our properties are listed on 12 websites and despite the lack of print media we have increased our market share in the first 6 months to more than 40% in the main suburb we operate in. So the internet works – if it didn’t then we could not have achieved this.
This home at http://www.realestate.co.nz/1080132/statistics had over 1100 hits in two weeks (10% of them from overseas) with a huge volume of people through it, multiple offers received and is now under contract.
Your headline could have been “Print media for real estate is dead – the internet killed it!”
It will be interesting to see what other web based developments are around the corner for real estate, maybe with GPS enabled 3G phones you will be able to drive into a suburb and have all the homes for sale show up on a map.
Even Twitter has been a useful development – initially I was dubious about it but it is a great way to notify people of new listings appointment times etc as you can see at http://twitter.com/sellrealty
Very exciting times ahead with all these web based marketing tools at our disposal!
Ross
As ever appreciate your feedback – there is clearly an alignment of views as to the role of real estate online.
However I must be honest in regard to your comment about featuring your listings on 12 websites – playing devil’s advocate – why 12 – why not 20,000 – what is important? – do you want to cast your listings to the web as dust to float around and land up anywhere – do you not value the integrity and relevance of which sites are important; and why do you want to grow other sites to distract this industry in online marketing?
I often come across websites – the kind of “newzealandpropertiesforsaleonline.com” – this I think is fictitious! – but it probably has 1,100 listings – of which 200 are from your office, another 700 are from your group – the balance being private listings for which some unsuspecting person has paid $99.95 to be on the site – the site gets a couple of hundred session visits per month – what is the value and why do you bother being on such a site? – you know hand on heart there are only really 3 websites that you need to be on!??
Alistair – you are correct that there are only 3 sites that we really need to be on and I guess you mean realestate.co.nz, trademe.co.nz and open2view.co.nz. but we also have to be on our professionals.co.nz site
I’m sure over time it will come down to less sites but we use open2view.co.nz as their photographers take our fabulous photos and supply our digital colour signs, trademe.co.nz because sellers demand it, professionals.co.nz and our company site lochores.co.nz we have to be on those as we are part of the group and our own office site sellrealty.co.nz which has been around for many years – buyers like it because all the properties we have are listed in price order and no searching is required. It is personalised directly to us.
I suspect over time that our voices blog site at http://www.unconditional.co.nz/ptchev will take over from the office website.
Others we use include gumtree.co.nz, googlebase.com, sella.co.nz and openhometimes.co.nz – although your recent initiative somewhat negates that.
We get enquiry from all of them but the majority come from realestate.co.nz followed by open2view.co.nz
Of course anything we have listed will also show up on the zoodle.co.nz inofrmation site.
We are not into using the many “aggregating” sites that are out there.
Ross
Useful insight. My 3 were actually realestate.co.nz and trade me as the aggregators plus your own office / company site. I had not counted in open2view, certainly not because I think it is irrelevant – far from it. They are an excellent photographic service, it is just that in using their photographers you then naturally would have your listing on their site – I was thinking more of the notion of you placing complete listings on websites.
Great feedback and useful insight for others reading this in terms of the relevancy of the web and your approach to print media
I’m just coming to the end of the book Alistair, what a great read. Be aware that at my open homes the answer to the question “where did you first see this property advertised?” is still 50% print media. If you don’t beleive me please bring a flat white to any of my opens this weekend and you can ask the punters yourself.
Steve,
I believe you, but I have a theory which I would like to get some feedback on!
Here is my take on the scenario – I put myself in the shoes of not someone running a real estate website, but as a property owner looking to buy a house.
I spend 4 weeks actively searching the web, reading the Property Press (I don’t actually read it – I view it!) – I keep a selection of properties in a list of “possibles” – at the weekend my wife and I do a series of open homes. I am reluctant at this stage to give away too many details of the situation to the agent at the open home.
I arrive at the open home, dutifully sign the book or provide my name and number. Then the question comes:
“Can I please ask you (for my records) where you saw this property / details of this property?”
I (remember)am here to view the open home – not to spend the afternoon chatting to the agent, so what do I say!?
“I saw it in the paper”
Why do i say that? – it is the answer that does not get a follow up question. I can quickly then move through the house.
The reality is that I saw the property first on the web on an email alert. I get the paper on a Saturday religiously and before leaving the house I double checked the open home time – in the paper.
Now if I had been honest – you would have responded to my answer of “I saw it on the web” with the question “oh – which website?” – now I don’t want to get into the discussion of which website – I just want to look through the house!
So this is my rationale of why they say one thing and do something totally different – share your thoughts.
By the way now that we are publishing more and more open home times and communicating through open home schedules and search filters there is no need to check the paper!!
You’ve got a point Alistair, you’re passionate about online and your site, and it shows!
Online vs print is a fascinating battle that we all know will be won by online eventually. To a large extent I believe it’s a generation thing. Plenty of the grey haired buyers will see a home on the internet then grab the paper because that’s the way they’ve always done it.
If the paper wasn’t there they’d adapt I’m sure, but for now it’s a comfort thing. From a vendor’s viewpoint (at least in my area) not being in the paper would seem odd, but again they’d adapt if it wasn’t there. It’s just going to take time for change to happen.
I believe social networks will play a big part in future delivering homes to buyers, but that’s a whole new topic.
Last week Barfoots sold a nice big home in Epsom over $3mil. I was telling a friend about the sale and she had no clue which property I was talking about. This friend scans websites and papers religiously ‘just in case’ the perfect home comes up. Not a serious buyer, and would be in a lower price range anyway.
I was surprised my friend knew nothing about the Epsom home that was sold. It hadn’t appeared on her radar screen. She searches Trademe in Mt Eden/Remuera and sometimes Epsom. She also scans the Property Press, rarely the Herald.
The home in question was sold with two competing offers and was only advertised online, Trademe, Barfoots and your site. Online is getting wins, things are changing, slowly.
Alistair I think most of us accept that the market is more and more turning to online information in order to make decisions, but newspaper advertising is not quite dead yet
I hypothesise that the reason for that is that people know that online information (particularly information about one-off items for sale) can be out of date. We have a perception that a newspaper is likely to be more up to date than a web site.
As you said yourself Alistair, you double-checked the home open time.
However whether we advertise online or offline or any combination of those, because the market is so tough right now, the advertisement itself has to create more emotional leverage than ever before, just for an agent to survive.
A few years ago I came across a unique style of home advertisement that basically got a subconscious “yes” from the reader before they’d even seen the house, by placing them into an emotionally-charged headline that had them experiencing the home as if they lived there.
And example for a home with a swimming pool, targetting families with children: “String Up the Net” followed by a body that said something like “and play a mean game of pool tennis in this beautiful entertaining area”.
At this stage I think we must advertise online and offline, but our advertisements need to step up a notch in order to achieve buyer engagement much more powerfully with an “experiential” rather than old-fashioned descriptive ad style.