Any creative ideas on how to market real estate? (6)
Hello guys,
Was wondering if any of you have any creative tips on how to market real estate on the internet? Ideas for offline marketing are also welcomed 
Thanks in advance
I think you will need to be much more specific than this.
Is this commercial property, residential, REIT, REOC, raw land? Is this in Manhattan, Central London, middle of Oklahoma or Mongolia? How much is the property worth?
Real estate is a nonfungible asset. Each type or class or location of real estate will need to be marketed based on what the target market for that asset is.
Thanks for replying Cmdeal.
Sorry for not giving enough details. I'm trying to help a local agency that deals with residential assets in Israel. Price range is anything between 200k to 600k USD.
I'm trying to think of some creative stuff and not do what everyone are already doing. Any ideas and tips will be much appreciated
This is a competitive market. Instead of trying to reinvent the wheel or do anything really radically creative, just doing the basics right would be the best place to start.
The buying behaviour for $600k property is very different than the buying behaviour for a mobile game download or an antivirus. Most people don't just buy $600k on a whim. This means that the people who are in the market for such property will be actively searching for such property. They are also not just going to buy the first property whose ad they see. They will compare, and they will search some more.
This means that you should examine the traditional channels that people use (e.g. property portals, property search engines, Google, etc) and make sure that you are doing everything right in order to optimise your agency's listing in them. I still see many property agents on sites like Rightmove in the UK or realestate.com.au in Australia whose photos are awful, their descriptions are awful, and they make their properties hard to search. Just like the same property on Airbnb can look amazing and highly desirable if the listing is done properly and awful and unappealing if the person listing has no idea what he or she is doing, the same is the case for residental property sales listings.
Believe it or not, I started the most visited real estate portal in my country together with a bunch of my friends, here it is if you wanna have a look : www.topreality.sk
I am not involved in the project for several years anymore - too many heads for one project, so I sold my share - unfortunately too soon, so my return wasn't any spectacular, but whatever, we all make mistakes
Anyways, I dealt with real estate agencies a lot and we could see who is doing a good or bad job and of course we saw what the engagement looked like for each agency.
The absolutely curcial factor was the quality of the presentation : photos/videos, description with all the needed details - the more professionally it was written, the better the response. Small photos, poor descriptions, grammar mistakes in the presentation ... this all killed the performance pretty much. Just as cmdeal posted above - if it was put together by a pro, the response was way better than a presentation made by some clueless individual.
We were doing a lot of market research, what worked surprisingly well were classified sites, so like craigs-list and thelikes, these are actually starting to dominate on the market in my country now.
We've done a lot of offline print advertising too, this helped a lot with the reputation and got us a lot of interest from real estate agencies, but it didn't actually attract buyers all that much. Not sure about other GEOs but in my country, the print advertising for real estate is pretty much dead, except for large developers who advertise their new projects, but I have my doubts about the response. Big board (billboards) seem to work still, when strategically placed to gain public awareness of a project.
We also bought a lot of traffic for the portal, at some point we were buying all traffic we actually could. The best worked adwords obviously, the most performing angle was : "...we have a ton of listings in YOUR area too...", the localized approach worked very well. When we were able to target the proper city or region and match it with good listings, the response was superb.
Facebook can also bring a lot of traffic for this, but its more dreamers than actual buyers - good way to get traffic was to show luxurious real estate and target users from the same area, that worked wonders for clicks
So much for now, maybe some of this can help you in a way
thanks for all the input Cmdeal and Matuloo!
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