December 20th, 2007 · 2 Comments
The Zillovians have been busy lately…first, singing a Zillow-fied Christmas carol…then, more substantively, releasing their new Smart Search technology, which, if I understand correctly, presents different information intelligently, based on where and at what zoom level you’re searching.
At the San Mateo county level, for instance, I get this:
At the city level, this is what I get for Menlo Park:
If I want more info on Menlo Park, I learn that local residents
- are well-educated
- are often multi-lingual
- are likely immigrants
- spend more money on housing compared to others
- ride their bikes to work
With the exception of the latter, it seems spot on.
Nice new features, but nothing earth-shattering.
What I’d really like to see from Zillow is something I’ve talked about before: addressing the advertising needs of buy-side Realtors. The Sellsius twins have weighed in on this issue as well.
Here’s what I have in mind: The advertising emphasis in real estate has always been on the listing side. If a home is for sale, that represents more than just an upcoming commission check for the listing agent: done correctly, it’s also marketing collateral. It’s an excuse to send out more branding postcards, to take out an ad in the paper, to hold open houses, to put out a sign…all things designed more to enhance the branding of the agent than to necessarily sell the home in question.
If the fact that I am selling a home or I just finished listing and selling my client’s home is good marketing collateral, why not make something of I just helped my clients buy a home?
We do a bit of this in the industry already: witness the occasional “represented buyer” newspaper ad — which is often just space filler around the more prominent “just sold” ads.
Zillow has a perfect opportunity here. While most of the online real estate conversation is about homes currently on the market, Zillow’s repository of all homes is perfect for telling a broader story, one which includes the buyer’s agent.
Hey Zillow — in your next product release, make it possible for the buy-side agent to tout their recent transactions too!
Tags:
Advertising,
Industry,
Menlo Park,
Real estate,
Technology,
Zillow
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Tags: * Export · Industry
There’s nothing like a quiet walk along the beach, being towed by an eager dog named Little Bit, to contemplate — even solve — the deep mysteries of life. I’ve been pondering the status of real estate advertising lately, and the answer to one particularly vexing question — Why, despite declining readership, despite more tangible online ROI, despite rising prices, do Realtors (r) still continue to advertising in traditional print media? — suddenly came to me. The inspiration was none other than Little Bit’s morning constitutional, dispatched with amazing regularity on piles of beach detritus standing in as a proxy for the more regularly favored target, the city fire hydrant.
You see, my friends, there are even more similarities between us humans and our canine allies than we had ever thought. It turns that the same 3 motivations behind Little Bit’s biological machinations also underpin the clockwork-like precision by which Realtors (r) spend $800 of their hard-earned money to advertise, seemingly increasingly futilely, in newspapers. Here goes:
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Branding — By consistently spraying his scent, Little Bit reinforces his brand recognition. Ah yes, Little Bit — I remember him! If you’re ever looking for a good game of catch-the-tennis-ball, he’s the one! In the same way, Realtors spray their scent — more accurately, their picture — across pages of newsprint in hopes that, over time, some of it will stick. Ah yes, Realtor John — I remember him! If you’re ever looking for a good agent, he’s the one!
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Marking territory — A close relative of the first, marking territory is all about establishing dominance. Little Bit’s thought process: So what if Fifi, Fluffy, Buffy, and Max have all passed by? The real king of this beach is Little Bit. That’s right, you sniffed it here! I’m not gonna let these interlopers pretend they own this area!Realtor John’s thought process: So what if Realtors Fran, Franklin, Betty, and Mike have already plastered their pictures over pages 1-5 of this week’s real estate section? My picture is better! bigger! less recent! They don’t own this area, I do!
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Habit — Little Bit pees because, well, that’s what dogs do! Even he can’t remember whether his mother taught him, or his early playmates did, or if he just took to it naturally. Realtor John advertises in the newspaper because, well, that’s what Realtors do! It may have been one of his early mentors, or some buddies of his in that first brokerage he worked in 2 decades ago, but regardless, that’s just what comes naturally!
Tags:
Advertising,
Industry
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Tags: * Export · Advertising · Industry
I wanted to have a compelling title for a little experiment I recently did with my listing at 206 Palmita Place in Downtown Mountain View. It’s a newer construction home and I thought the location and price would appeal to couples or small families. Based on that demographic, I assumed more people would be searching for homes online, so I built a custom website for the house, and posted links to it on a number of real estate websites in addition to the ones like mlslistings.com that link to data on the MLS.
I also followed conventional wisdom and ran ads in the Palo Alto Weekly and Mountain View Voice newspapers, and an entry in the Open Homes Section of the San Jose Mercury News.
I then did some informal polling at the various open houses, asking visitors where they found out about the open house, leaving it as an open ended question. I also tracked hits to the website and looked at who the referring domains were. I found the results interesting and surprising.
Where did they come from?
Over the course of 4 days of open houses (Thurs and Fri evenings, Sat and Sun afternoons) we had 135 groups of visitors through. Of these, only 2 said they came based on the ad in the MV Voice, 1 from the Palo Alto Weekly and 1 from the SJ Merc. Another 11 groups had seen the open house directional signs (I blanketed the neighborhood) or the For Sale sign in the yard as they were passing by. That’s 14 out of 135 groups, or about 11%. The other 89% of visitors either found the listing online or were referred by their agents.
Online sources
I also tracked where hits to the website came from. There were over 2200 hits to the website, and initially 70% of those came from Movoto which is an online real estate information / referral site. After the first two days, mlslistings.com caught up, and after the first week was the source of about 70% of the hits. The house went under contract after a week, so I stopped tracking then.
While I admit that I am biased, I have had a theory for a while that newspaper ads for listings, especially in Palo Alto and surrounding communities, are more for advertising the agent and getting him or her more clients than getting potential Buyers into your home.
The National Association of Realtors estimates that 74% of home buyers begin their search for a home online, and the estimate for Silicon Valley is 92%. I’m still running an ad for my new listing in Redwood City, but it is only 1/4 page and that is because the sellers believe that potential buyers read the paper. I am also flooding the internet with placements and links, and I’m trying an experiment by posting the home on Zillow as well. It’s another experiment, and I’m partially doing it to get under Kevin’s skin as Zillow is a hot-button for him.
I’m tracking the marketing response on the Redwood City house as well, and I’ll do a post on the results from that when it goes under contract. In the meantime, I welcome your comments and hope for a bit of banter on online vs. print marketing.
Thanks for reading.
Tags:
94041,
Advertising,
Alternative business models,
bay-area-real-estate,
Business of real estate,
California Association of Realtors,
Demographics,
Fun with Zillow,
Home buying,
Home selling,
Keller Williams,
Movoto,
Online-real-estate-advertising,
Real estate,
Real-estate-advertising,
Redwood City,
San Jose Mercury,
Technology,
Zillow
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Tags: Real estate
I've been waiting for the right opportunity to really push the envelope of online real estate marketing, and, well, it's here!
I'm working on a listing in San Francisco's Potrero Hill neighborhood that fits perfectly into this new online marketing world: it's slick, chic, and contemporary, will likely attract a younger and web-savvy crowd of buyers, and the sellers simply love the idea of creating a buzz online.
We're passing on the normal full-color ads in traditional local media like the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Jose Mercury News, and we'll be spending that money online instead. To hedge our bets, we will be placing open house display ads in print media.
I'll be collaborating with several real estate online marketing companies to promote this property. They'll be showing me — and, by extension, my readers — how to get the full benefit of their products. I intend to chronicle our adventures here and invite you to follow along. If you have some ideas, feel free to join in!
I'll announce the first collaborator tomorrow.
In the meantime, as part of our adventures, let's see how high this site currently ranks for the search, "San Francisco Potrero Hill Real Estate" — I suspect it won't be that good, since I've never written about Potrero Hill before!
Sure enough, on Google, Yahoo, and MSN, I'm nowhere to be found, not even in the top 100. 
Google:
Yahoo:
MSN:
Tags:
Advertising,
Buyer and seller tips,
Disclosures,
For sellers,
Google,
Media,
MSN,
Newspapers,
Online advertising,
Potrero Hill,
Preparing a home,
Real estate,
San Francisco,
San Francisco Chronicle,
San Jose Mercury,
Yahoo
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Tags: Advertising · Buyer and seller tips · Disclosures · For sellers · Google · MSN · Media · Newspapers · Online advertising · Potrero Hill · Preparing a home · Real estate · San Francisco · San Francisco Chronicle · San Jose Mercury · Yahoo
Sufficiently warned by Michael Price about the quality and content of entries submitted to this week’s Carnival of Real Estate, let me dispense with my gratuitous Latin phrase by boldly placing it in the title…and assuring you that my post has absolutely nothing to do with spinach in your dentures. It’s just that I couldn’t find a Latin translation site that would reliably render the following headline: Creative Internet Advertising Your Broker Never Thought Of.
One of the first things you learn from many of the old-timers in the business is the importance of listings, for at least two reasons:
- Your “sales force” — the other agents in your area, some of whom may have competed with you for the listing — does much of the legwork of showing the property to prospective buyers.
- Having a listing gives you an “anchor” from which to further advertise yourself: an ad in the paper, a sign in the front yard, a brochure, a neighborhood mailing, an appearance in the MLS. This may well lead to further business for you…and as a side benefit may even help you sell the home.
The buyer’s agent, alas, has no such anchor. The fact that I represented the most recent buyer of 123 Main Street doesn’t offer a good opportunity to advertise myself. The new owner — my client — is unlikely to allow me to put a “Buyer Proudly Represented by” sign in his front lawn for too long, and if he did, he’d be inviting a host of unwanted guests, thinking the home is still for sale. I could send out a postcard to the neighborhood, trumpeting my success, but postcards are a pretty ineffective marketing mechanism unless you send them out regularly and for a long time. I could take out an ad in the local paper announcing my success, but that’s unlikely to generate any calls since the public has been trained to look in the paper for listings, not recent sales.
The excitement, the story, the marketing value of a transaction has always been quite firmly on the listing side. The buyer’s side is, well, yesterday’s news. While that makes sense, it’s not in sync with the fact that a home spends only a tiny fraction of its life as a listing. During the vast majority of the time in which the home is not on the market, shouldn’t there be some way of getting some marketing around my involvement in the purchase of that home?
The answer, of course, is “Yes.” The Internet does indeed present an opportunity for buyers’ agents to strut their success. At least two examples come to mind.
- Sites like HomeThinking.com ask clients to rate their agents’ performance. The “anchor” for this rating and the (hopefully!) positive exposure is not only the listing side of the transaction, but also the buying side.
- Zillow and its AVM brethren potentially present another such opportunity, though those sites don’t currently have such functionality. While most real estate sites concentrate on today’s news — the listings — Zillow’s inventory is all homes, not just homes that are currently for sale, and the history of those homes has some marketing value. If I wanted to highlight my buying agent experience in a particular neighborhood, I could — for a fee, of course, — perhaps add a virtual “Buyer of this home proudly represented by…” sign that would appear next to my past transactions.
Increasing the marketing value of the buying side of a transaction is unlikely to fundamentally shift the balance of power from the listing side, but it certainly does present an interesting new form of online advertising.
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* Translation: You have a big piece of spinach in your front teeth.
Tags:
Advertising,
Business of real estate,
Homethinking.com,
Online advertising,
Real estate,
Zillow
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Tags: Advertising · Business of real estate · Homethinking.com · Online advertising · Real estate · Zillow
