Marketing New Construction Real Estate

Twitter is all the rage right now.  Everywhere you turn, everyone is saying that you need to be Tweeting.  How well does Twitter lend itself to the real estate industry?  If we take a look at Twitter’s user demographics; Twitter can be condusive in growing a real estate business.

Key Twitter User Demographic Stats:

• 32.1 Million Members (worldwide)
• Attracts Educated Young Adults
• Median Age: 31
• 50% of Members with income of $60k+

Here’s an example of how Jay Thompson, a Realtor in Pheonex, effectively utilize Twitter in his real estate business.  Click Here

Here’s an excellent presentation by Benson Wong on how Realtors should use social media.  He makes a great point on what Realtor’s should expect from social networking.  Click here to see the rest of his blog post.

How to Really Use Social Media from Benson Wong on Vimeo.

In a soft market where the volume and velocity of sales have slowed down significantly, a lot of companies/people are cutting back on their marketing. Right now is the time to do more marketing! If we focus on marketing now, we can captures more market share because there’s less competition. Although we have less dollars to spend on marketing, the key is to spend those dollars effectively and understanding (not guessing) how those dollars are producing (ROI).

In developing a marketing budget and strategy, there are a few things that we should do.

1. Try new marketing avenues
2. Focus on attracting internet buyers/online shoppers
3. Track and quantify every effort/dollar (ROI)

Try New Marketing Avenues: If sales are sluggish and we are not receiving results; try something new! Using the same marketing avenues and efforts will produce the same results! We all understand this but for some reason, maybe because it’s comfortable, we continue the same marketing efforts but expect the results to be different. Get out of the usual routine.

Focus on attracting internet buyers/online shoppers: With 90% of real estate buyers already shop online for homes, we need to focus our marketing efforts to attract these online shoppers. We should allocate a larger percentage of our marketing efforts/budgets online.

In the real estate industry, online shoppers are our ideal clients/demographics (especially if we are looking to accelerate the velocity of our sales). Here are some interesting statistics (thanks to Dakno Marketing).

• The average internet buyer spends an only 2.2 weeks working with the Realtor to find their home. The traditional buyer spends almost 6 weeks!

• Internet Buyers only previewed an average of 6.65 homes while the Traditional Buyer previewed 21.7.

Buyers who use the web as an important part of their buying process are usually savvy and have already invested the time to educate themselves. We can spend less time educating and more time selling.

Track and quantify every effort/dollar (ROI): Unlike expensive traditional media (newspapers, magazines, billboards, painted busses, etc), online marketing is track able and quantitative. It’s tracked automatically (avoid the human error associated with asking “how did you hear about us”) so the data is accurate. Every online marketing effort (paid or free) is 100% track able. If set up correctly, we can use Google Analytics (which is a free service) to calculate our actual ROI. Understanding which marketing avenues and campaigns are effective is one of the most important factors of any marketing.

What online/marketing avenues have worked (or not worked) for you?