Written by: Matthew Ferrara of Matthew Ferrara & Company
A while ago I wrote a short article comparing some of the “standard” real estate marketing tools with those of other industries. I remember commenting how REALTORS, who sell commodities in the hundreds of thousands of dollars range, try to entice buyers with printouts made from an off-the-shelf inkjet printer on recycled paper, while automobile companies readily offer super-glossy-multi-page professional brochures to promote their lowliest of models. Of course, times change: When Baby Boomers invented the real estate industry, printing anything was a mimeographic achievement, so the small office printer was a revolutionary upgrade in marketing in the 1990s. Yet today’s buyers and sellers increasingly come from the Gen X and Gen Y demographics.
Does anyone still think we’re going to re-start the housing market by handing out listing sheets?
Let’s review some basic facts: Last year the average first time buyer was 31 years old, smack-in-the-middle of the Gen X/Y profile. This means many buyers were in their early twenties, while some lagged into old-age-thirties. Even the average seller was only 45 – the tail end of the Boomers, even if they try to pass themselves off as early X’ers. Either way we’re talking consumers who entertain on YouTube, read the news on their iPhones and post video clips to their Facebook page with their eyes closed. Whether it’s a kitchen faucet from Kohler or a new laptop from DELL, the way to attract these consumers is modern multimedia.
Of course, some printed items still work to provide information about products and services. For example, luxury products like the LearJet – comparable in price to some premier homes around the country – feature downloadable PDF spec-sheets complementing their virtual tour and video marketing. not completely unlike a property listing sheet found on some better real estate websites. Still, even LearJet could improve its printed marketing tools compared to a travel site like Abercrombie and Kent, whose Royal Scotsman Train Holiday offers an eight-page brochure online for a $7000-10,000 product. Even an inexpensive piece of software like ACT by Sage offers a multi-page full color product brochure.
The bottom line: One-page property listing sheets are simply pathetic.
To be fair, it’s not just the one page printout that’s awful; it’s the one-page information presentation that most real estate websites provide as well. Whether it’s a jet or a vacation or a software program, all of which have stiff competition in their price range, the marketing tools on their websites offer much more than a single page. Yet most real estate presentations stick to an address, a couple of photos, a few bullet points and a paragraph describing the product. Forget about the huge gap in multimedia – the Learjet site is NASA-like in it’s design while the ACT site offers a full-product video demonstration and a trial mini-site. It seems nearly impossible that real estate would ever reach that level of product marketing, considering the continuing challenge to get agents to put more than a half-dozen photos on every listing. Yet you have to wonder if the real estate industry has some other reason why it continues to propagate the one-page minimalist approach to marketing its products.
Oh, right: They want to force the customer to call.
Does providing less information lead customers to call, email or otherwise contact the “broker” of a product? Possibly. But has anyone ever wondered how many people simply don’t reach out at all, when so little marketing information is presented? Why do so many buyers who visit an open house fail to call for a second appointment? Was it because they didn’t like the house the first time – or that the listing sheet was such a poor “sales support piece” that it failed to inspire them to consider a second look? What percentage of online leads never inquire on a listing – or at best, delay that inquiry because the presentation of home information is flat, one-dimensional, and mostly organized like an IRS form?
Could the listing sheet actually be harming sales?
Any of this could be possible. But perhaps it’s not even that complicated. Maybe it’s just another example of how the Gen X / Gen Y consumer has moved far beyond the Baby Boomer modality of the real estate sales industry (I almost typed “stales” industry – what an interesting slip that would have been…) Listing sheets aren’t just a bad marketing piece; they are a bad marketing mentality. They reduce homes to uniform, tabular experiences that mostly fail to excite, entice or even adequately inform the potential buyer. The “just the facts” approach to room sizes, amenities and taxes smothers emotional excitement about buying a home. Everything about the listing sheet presentation is dull, rough, plain-paper-bag.
Where are the download-ready multi-page flyers, with edge-to-edge high quality photography? Who is handing out CD’s or flash drives at open houses with dozens of photos, documents and videos to help the buyer learn as much as possible? Have you ever seen an agent offer to SMS a video clip from their smartphone to the buyer’s smartphone after touring a home? I’m guessing these aren’t the ordinary experiences that real estate agents are offering to their customers today.
Think about a great product experience. Perhaps it’s the thrill of flying on a private jet. The luxurious feeling of a train ride through the Scottish Highlands. The creativity of a powerful, intuitive piece of software. There’s no way those emotional responses can be conveyed on a single web page or printout. Complex sales take complex marketing tools. Capturing the value proposition of these products simply can’t be done in a sanitized one-page format.
Real estate is perhaps one of the most complex transactions – emotionally, financially, intellectually. Trying to excite buyers by handing them a single piece of paper seems – well – just a little pathetic.
- Matthew
