blog

So before I went to sleep, I was reading some other blogs to get the low down on what’s going on.

I’ve liked Joel Burslem’s blog “Future of Real Estate Marketing” for a while now, and I don’t always agree with his views, but I think he calls it like he sees it..

His recent post, A conversation with Michael Yang, General Manager of Yahoo Real Estate, had an odd factoid in it that I couldn’t shake… it made me get up from my bed and write this post.

“Just in shear numbers alone, Comscore estimates there are 13.2 million people actively looking at real estate online, Michael estimates that combined Yahoo properties touch 89% of them. (that could be through Yahoo!Mail, News, Search etc.)”

I’ve long believed that with the commoditization of real estate listing data with IDX and realtor.com, that lead incubation times have increased several fold. These numbers seem to support that assumption. There are only about 5.5M real estate transactions every year, so what are the other 8 million people doing? They have started their home search 12 or even 18 months out.

So?
Back when I bought my first house there was no realtor.com and if I wanted information about homes in a particular area, I had to have an actual face to face powwow with a real live agent. They were going to get my phone number and maybe even my address. Christ, you didn’t do that unless you were “in the market”. Lead quality was much higher, and the total cost of revenue was a lot lower.

So?
I think this greatly impacts how we approach internet advertising and how we treat internet lead generation. Lead generation sites like House Values sell leads for $50 a pop and you are lucky if 1 in 25 of them converts into real business in the next 6 months. What’s worse is, in buying leads you spent money on “prospects” and a “pipeline” instead of brand building, which has a much better ROI.

Internet advertising is absolutely essential, however some thought should be given to just how to incubate those leads and keep the communication lines open and personal.