The real estate industry has been a focal point for most of my adult life and I’ve been fortunate to experience it from almost every angle. I had my own office at 21 and went on to work within a franchise group at various levels. These days, I still conduct auctions for several leading Sydney real estate offices - it’s an adjunct to my work in publishing that keeps me connected to what’s happening in the marketplace.

In my role as Group Real Estate Advertising Director for News Limited, you’d expect to hear me say print advertising is not dead, but my beliefs are not due to my job. If anything, I’m in this job because my experience in real estate has shown me that to get the very best result for a vendor you need to use both print and on-line marketing. And it’s not just a matter of my opinion.

Gil Davis, author of “Sell for More”, conducted extensive research across Sydney and Melbourne using data from Rismark International and RP Data. He looked at thousands of properties, comparing on-line-only marketing campaigns, print campaigns and campaigns which used a combination of both. He found that although it’s possible to get a result by using internet alone, on average, agents get a better result by using print and internet together.

The reasons are fairly straightforward. All agents know the early part of a marketing campaign presents a limited window of opportunity to “cut-through”. The aim is to get as many of the active buyers in the marketplace interested at the same time to create a sense of urgency and competition.

An internet-only strategy will provide good cut-through to buyers utilising online research in the first few weeks, particularly if they’ve signed up for email alerts of new listings. But intuitively, this strategy will not necessarily reach every possible buyer, as not everyone prefers the internet. And if you don’t have every possible buyer in the running, it follows that you don’t have the maximum amount of competition.

Deloitte’s 2008 State of the Media survey in the US reported that nearly 75% of respondents prefer a printed version of a magazine, even if they could see the same information online. With paper you can cut it, fold it, highlight it and carry it with you.

If you’ve started out with an internet-only campaign, once you’ve exhausted the on-line based buyers and no sale has been achieved, the campaign is stuck. The property will just languish amongst all the others that are also in stuck mode, lost in the crowd. It’s an ongoing challenge for the portals to find ways to differentiate properties and it’s hard to re-energise the campaign at this point.

Here’s something else all agents know - more often than not, the longer a property has been on the market, the lower the price gets and the higher the cost for your agency in terms of the time you’ve spent. So taking a chance with a half-hearted approach at the beginning with such a high value and important transaction is a dangerous move for your vendor indeed.

The sceptics have been saying for years that print is dead, but it’s still going strong. I remember being told a few years ago when I was running the NSW News Ltd business that print would be all over by 2007. In fact, since then advertising sizes have gone up. We now do double page spreads for $2million+ properties, something we never did before. Print advertising in Australia is far more sophisticated than in the US or the UK. You cannot find real estate products like the Wentworth Courier anywhere else in the world.

There’s no doubt that overall, classified advertising around the world is in decline, particularly for sectors like employment which have largely moved on-line. But real estate is different. Property advertising is primarily pictorial and we do much of it on high gloss paper. Trevor Swanepoel, author of Trend Reports in the USA believes the vendor paid advertising model in Australia is excellent and something American agents could learn from.

Let’s not forget the significant side effect of print advertising - it effectively builds your brand and helps attract more listings as well as buyers. These are not the primary reasons for using print in your vendor marketing campaigns, but they’re great by-products that can’t and shouldn’t be ignored.

For agents who tell me they can’t afford to use print advertising, I say you cannot afford to live in that paradigm. You have to get good or get out - all advertising should be vendor paid. A responsible and effective agent will easily be able to educate their vendors as to the value attached to a comprehensive campaign with both print and on-line components. And the proof will be in the pudding when your strategy gets them the best possible price available in the marketplace.

Tom Panos is the Group Real Estate Advertising Director of News Limited. He oversees strategy and development across the real estate category, where News Limited publishes over 150 different newspapers. News Limited is also the majority shareholder of real estate portal realestate.com.au.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 7th, 2009. Categories: Prospecting and Marketing, Real Estate.