Realtors Need to Realign Their Tactics

 

The action on the local media battlefield has certainly shifted to the Web.  Newspapers are scrambling to make up losses in classified advertising.  TV stations are scrambling to cover declines in automotive and political ads.  Radio operators are worried about a future in which audio programming comes from computer speakers and iPods instead of radios. 

And yellow page directories are finally getting serious about trying to stop the migration of business look-ups to the Web as Google and Yahoo add local addresses and phone numbers to search results.

Statistics show that web traffic has already replaced walk-in-traffic and now it is on the verge of replacing newspaper traffic. With that in mind, agents’ websites have become a vital link in the marketing road to success.

The more effort agents put into improving the quality of their web content and building up the ranking of their websites, the more likely they will produce more and better quality leads and sales.  It is still all about information and content, with the listing remaining the key to the real estate transaction. 

Before the Internet’s widespread popularity, real estate brokers and agents basically had three ways in which to promote their listings:  the multiple listing service (MLS), newspapers and home listing magazines.

Clearly you have your own personal, local and company related websites and on a national level you even have a larger, already impressive, and yes growing, list of national sites.

But listings of houses-for-sale should also be exposed to the broadest suitable group of websites, be they aggregators, lead generators, portals and/or syndicator websites and so on.

The web didn’t add just one additional option but now due to the size, scope, reach, complexities and choices available, brokers and agents have a smorgasbord of new options.

You may want to check out the 2008 Swanepoel TRENDS Report (http://www.retrends.com/) for an update on the status of lead generation if you haven’t yet realigned all your tactics for the new real estate marketing war.