This week I’ve decided to share some of our findings with property marketing strategies and offer my predictions for how marketing campaigns will change in the near future.
Currently the real estate marketing space is dominated by two players, Realestate. com.au (REA) and Domain. They’ve held a comfortable duopoly now since 1995 and despite a plethora of portals attempting to break into the space, none have been successful so far. However they’re not immune to challengers and our own internal research and developement this year has shown us we can double the number of buyers through opens through well targeted social marketing.
CoreLogic estimates that the average Australian sells their property every 11 years. This means that they are only Active buyers for around one year, and for the remaining 10 years are Inactive or Passive Buyers, therefore they will not be found on REA and Domain. We estimate around 3% of the population is active on these portals at any time. However we know that 83% of the Australian population is on Facebook and most are active on a daily basis. Even more of the population are exposed to Google on a daily basis.
Essentially, Facebook and Google can not only deliver us active buyers, but also these passive/inactive buyers – something the real estate portals just aren’t achieving at this stage. In essence we’re expanding our buyer pool from 3% of the population to 40% who have an interest in real estate.
The results have been outstanding, one of our campaigns saw 56 groups in the first open, a neighbouring property using conventional marketing with another agent had only 16 groups. Our auction had 14 registered bidders, theirs had 2. Does that make us the next distrupter? Perhaps it does…
