The Rivalry of TV & the WEB…The future of marketing for the Real Estate Industry
Marketing homes for sale is no longer the routine task of the typical Brokerage. i.e. Newspaper Advertisement, Open House, MLS input, Direct Mail is becoming less and less effective. Proof of this is the fact that the Los Angeles Times permanently shut down it’s Real Estate Section at the end of July. Now this is not completely related to market conditions; no it is more so related to the fact that Home buyers and sellers can turn to far richer media sources for their information on Real Estate.
Can we learn from history? Radio and motion pictures took it on the chin from the Television. Now Television, radio, motion pictures and the newspapers are taking it on the chin from the internet.
The Real Estate Industry has already shifted…..funny thing is that the Brokerages and the agents have yet to figure that out. In a recent article by Inman News, Channing Dawson states that in 2007 Internet video made up 22% of all consumer Internet traffic and that this year it would be up to 32%. California has higher percentages of computers per household and if we were to measure the volume of Internet video use for California alone I am sure it would out pace the numbers above. According to the same article, three year old YouTube has about 62 million visitors per month. Now granted YouTube is not the most effective site for advertising Real Estate, but more important the trend shows that hyper-rich media content is growing in demand and usage.
What this all means to home sellers…Price and Condition are the very first two issues that will make or break the sale of your home. If your home is the nicest home in the area, but over priced…it does not matter if I fly the Goodyear Blimp over your house to market it and have a marching band go up and down your street. Buyers will only pay what the market will bare. Once the Price-Condition-factor is respected, marketing needs to have a twofold goal. First, your property needs to be ubiquitous and this takes effort. The Multiple Listing Service does not do this job for your agent. The MLS is only part of the exposure plan. Second is to target the largest pool of buyers. Knowing where to find these buyers is paramount to the success for making sure you get the proper exposure.
As a teaser to get you to think about where the future of Real Estate Marketing is going and how buyers should be targeted, I will leave you with this Video conference by Peter Hirshberg who worked for Apple during the pioneering days of the World Wide Web and now is on the Board of Directors of Technorati
This video is pretty technical and shows how media has developed over the last 100 years, but more importantly it shows how powerful technology has become, how the people crave interaction and that they will move quicker to embrace change long before the mainstays of the industry take notice.
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