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Every time you direct your potential buyers and sellers to a property portal, you are ‘gifting’ them your data. It is time to embrace new media platforms and put your business first.
The real estate portals [REA and Domain] are currently the first ‘port-of-call’ in the home buying and selling process. A fresh property listing is one of the most compelling forms of content and they achieved this by simply being the first publishing point of new listings.
However, if new property listing content is king, the resulting data is the queen. Every time you direct your potential buyers and sellers to a portal, and grant that portal access to your data, you make them stronger, enabling them to justify their annual price hikes.
A quick history
In the days before the internet, real estate agents were the consumer's first stop in the home buying and selling process and classified listing content was the lifeblood of print media. The Sydney Morning Herald was an inch thick and publishing data was not a currency. Things have changed.
With the advent of the internet and Google, the portals saw an opportunity to take fresh listings content, and the high cost of print advertising was all the motivation the real estate industry needed to transition their listings to portals.
In return the portals charged a much smaller fee for listing on their website and used this revenue to drive traffic away from the agent to the portals, building their ranking in Google and promoting themselves as the ‘go-to’ hub for the sector.
So a website became the launchpad and key tool in the consumer journey. Although the quality of the leads was poor, and the volume of eye balls were small and poorly defined, it was effective because the real estate sector was looking for a ‘plan B’ against the dominance of print media.
Why did this happen?
- Agents underestimated the power of fresh listings content.
- The market underestimated the power of data in remarketing.
- The portals retained the data assets being created by the agents’ ad spend.
- The portals understood the eyeballs were migrating to online [desktop and search] and away from print media.
Don’t drive away your market data.
Cut to now – the eyeballs have migrated again. Consumers are spending significantly more time in social media environments. Desktop, as a media consumption device is largely dead and the smart phone is the critical link between content and the consumer.
The biggest intervention is the rise of digital ad tech for property, as this enables the industry to self-publish at scale and importantly, to retain their data.
This media shift is an existential threat to portals if agents, such as yourself, are prepared to change their relationship with the data their online spend creates, retaining it for their own use and business service.
Think of yourself as a publisher – you win a listing, manage the production of quality property content and then importantly, you retain your audience for future remarketing. Consider this as opposed to employing a portal where you give them your listing content and then you pay them to rent the data your previous content created so they can promote their brand to the consumer - it simply doesn’t make sense.
The portals are the biggest virtual real estate publishers in the market but the irony is, they don’t create, or even pay for, the content that defines them. It hurts to think of the thousands of dollars agents have spent with the portals, when you understand that the data this spend created is not theirs to benefit from.
The current state of play
The portals are worried, they see social media as a strategic threat and are now asking the industry to hand over their social media spend so they can drive traffic from the Facebook marketplace to their portal to prop up their numbers. This is the same strategy they applied to Google spend 20 years ago but the environment is significantly different:
- New listings content performs exceptionally well within social media.
- Social is the most powerful self-publishing platform currently available enabling you to be the first publisher of your new listings content.
- This means you can retain and optimise the data for your own benefit.
- Consumers expect social to be part of a media package.
Optimised property ad tech solutions such as ListingLogic level the playing field and put agents in the box seat.
Where to from here? Digital first? What about YOU first?
It makes sense to promote your listings first through social media as your most likely buyer is local and already has a social connection to the relevant postcode. Use the portal as your ‘plan B’.
Build your ad spend to compliment your other marketing efforts. Instant media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and WeChat let you shape and schedule your ad spend, to ensure maximum exposure.
Most importantly, build and retain your own proprietary virtual database, and use it to create a completive advantage for yourself and your agency, #youhavethepower.
ListingLogic is an automated ad tech solution for today’s astute real estate professional. The product captures your data and packages this for your own use in future remarketing. At
ListingLogic, we are passionate about giving agents back control of their future whilst providing them with a marketing edge.
If you would like to learn more about how ListingLogic can help you, contact:
Angela Tracey (ListingLogic Head of Strategic Partnerships)
MB: 0412 160 965
Neil Campbell (ListingLogic Founder/ Executive Director)
MB: +64 222 833 924
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