Mar 4, 2019
Real Estate Listing Marketing: Then And Now
In the 1980s, real estate agents had to advertise properties in the newspaper to compete. With no internet, almost no exclusive listings, and no co-broking, the only way to attract customers was to attract them with newspaper ads. For us in KL, that meant placing as many local newspaper classified ads as we could afford and fighting for the coveted spaces. That was it. The Classified section ran to a dozen pages in those days, with all the major firms underwriting two or three full columns per week. It was simple. It was direct. It worked, at least in part because real estate agents held the keys to the kingdom of available listings. Buyers couldn’t get in without them.
The internet: Same, same but different
All that changed with the advent of the internet. Today’s system for marketing listings has completely changed, while remaining strikingly much the same. While much more extraneous noise exists around the basic process, that process still involves agents displaying listings and hoping that prospects contact them. Of course, the rise of exclusive rather than open listings has brought other changes. Now agents market as intensively to other agents as to potential clients. This too has become an online process: we create e-brochures which we send agent to agent and company to company through email channels to highlight our properties, and our competitors do the same, all across the country. The big aggregators, like iproperty, property guru have seen a huge opportunity here to jump into this multi-billion dollar marketplace and create huge, heavily marketed websites which, in one form or another, sell agents the leads which used to come to us directly. Thus the extraneous noise
Social media advertising
Increasingly, agents also depend on social media to promote themselves, their listings, and their recent sales. Facebook for the older generation, and Instagram for the younger, both can offer enormous reach to a curated audience for a well-crafted message. Best of all, unless one opts for targeted ads, these promotions are free.
How to sell sellers
Print advertising no longer sells properties in most markets. As a result, most companies nationwide have cut way back on print marketing. Expensive and time-consuming to design and implement, it serves today more as a corporate brand builder and seller palliative than anything else. Sellers love to see their properties in print
Even if they understand somewhere deep inside that that beautiful print ad will likely remain irrelevant as a spur to sales. As we say at my firm, print ads don’t sell property, but they do sell sellers. So we continue to place one or two in a widely seen venue each month, trying to make them as visually appealing as possible.
The rise of agent branding
At the same time, the twin notions of corporate and individual agent branding have transformed the marketing landscape. Today, anyone can find listings online, but most people don't have the experience or understanding to interpret them, or to follow a sale through to the end. Agents must therefore sell their knowledge and experience as trusted advisors. Branding, a concept which didn’t even exist in our industry when I began, now occupies a critical space in the strategies of both companies and individuals. Today, probably at least as many dollars are devoted thereto as to listing promotion. Print, in its various forms in newspapers and magazines and billboards and bus shelters, can create memorable images to promote a company or a broker or a team. This has become the primary utility of print media for the real estate agencies of today: creating name recognition and visibility for our companies and our agents.
Original post by Forbes