Comment on Remember when? by Glenn

Nick, I totally disagree with your statement that the "main place people really look for property these days is the net on major portals" The net in general is certainly high and somepeople just use the internet, but other forms of marketing work. Do you think agents would spend money on signboards, magazine, newspaper, tv and radio ads of they did not bring in enquiries. Quick side issue :- Let me explain a little bit for those that want to jump in and say ads are funded by sellers.

That is true in very few cases.. Many agents will tell you that they only do vendor paid advertising but benchmark studies in our group, plus those of other industry organisations show that very few "vendor paid" agencies are even close to being totally vendor paid. ie.

They recover as much as they can from each owner but for numerous reasons (some owners dispute and will not pay, salespeople spend too much etc etc etc ) there is a huge shortfall between advertising expenditure and advertising recovered. Back to the subject at hand :- The web portals are responsible for a lot of exposure, but generally a buyer has viewed a number of different media sources before they purchased. What comes first and what is most important in the buyers mind is very hard to figure out.

We survey every purchaser and ask what media they used to find property with our office. Virtually all of them nominate multiple sources, and normally 3 or 4 sources. Whilst it's true that around 70% of purchasers advise that they used the internet, 70% also claim that they used the REIQ colour buyers guide, 60% claimed the magazine, 60% claimed the newspaper, 30% claimed signage. When you really look at the data you see that many of the sales are generated when a prospective purchaser views one property with us, and we either show them something else that they purchase or we follow them up later.

Then you have the traffic generated on the interent but from your own site. Many agencies get similiar enquries direct than what they receive through the portals because they rank well in google and other search engines. I have never seen a successful agency that relies primarily on the web portals..

and as such leaving it up to them to fix this problem will never work. Maybe we should just count all the ones who stipulate the internet as a source (whether it be the only source, or one of the sources of their enquiry) and promote the total $ figure of all of those sales on my website.... I think that might have been done before?.

Tue Apr 2007 10:04 (1 year, 9 months ago)