I was just reading the Trulia Blog today and this great post by Pete Flint the CEO at Truila, regarding the decline of income for US Newspapers in the area of Real Estate Classifieds. There’s no surprise there, the real surprise is actually how significant the decline is in, a short period of time. Here is Pete’s graphic:
He goes on to bullet the following:
- Total newspaper advertising revenue fell 16.6 percent in 2008 over the previous year to 37.8 billion dollars.
- Print advertising revenue fell 17.7 percent to 34.7 billion dollars while online advertising revenue dropped 1.8 percent to 3.1 billion dollars.
- Classified advertising revenue continued to plunge falling 29.7 percent to 9.97 billion dollars in 2008.
- Real estate classified spend fell 38% to 2.5 billion dollars.
Interestingly enough, as I travel around teaching about online marketing, I still hear agents over and over again proclaiming that they HAVE to put the listing in the newspaper to make the Seller happy. Nope… you really don’t.
The 2008 NAR Profile of Buyers and Sellers gives us the information found on the left. As you can see home buyers found their home by a variety of venues, but they reportedly only did so by print media less than 1% of the time.
Yet, agents spend a majority of their income on print media.
You can download this incredible useful book from Realtor.org for FREE, as part of the Right Tools, Right Now Campaign.
Click HERE, if you’re a Realtor® and would like to download the 2008 NAR Profile of Buyers and Sellers. Another great report is the California Association of Realtors® Internet versus Traditional Buyer Report. However, you do have to pay $30 for that report.
So, let me ask you this… When you’re meeting with your Seller and pitching your marketing plan, why wouldn’t you acknowledge that most MLS put your listing in Realtor.com. Go a step further and let them know that you’ll also put it on your webpage, your companies webpage and Trulia, Zillow, Backpage, MyOwnerMLS, DotHomes, Enormo, Frontdoor, Google, Hotpads, local, lycos, Odle, Vast, Cragslist, Facebook, Twitter and more! There are lots of tools out there, but Postlets is my favorite. It’s very easy and one source and FREE!!!
Take some time, do some reading and find an effective market plan, that you can support with facts to your clients.
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Matthew…This is exactly what I do. Sellers that are aware of the market understand and appreciate the value of their property being on as many web sites as possible.
I would add one more site to your list: Activerain.com.
Kate,
I rarely recommend Activerain. It’s pretty liable and really only useful for new bloggers to get started and to talk to other real estate bloggers.
The real value is an outside blog and once Activerain started charging for outside blogs, I started recommending Wordpress.com which is free and has great SOE. You can read some of concerns here: http://agentgenius.com/?p=11266
Matthew Rathbun’s last blog post..Making your Blog a Newsletter is Easy!