Moving futher into the I-world

I have just about completely given up spending on print ads. Occasionally I'll do one if I can come up with a catchy theme that might draw some attention. The truth is that, except for providing the sellers with something int he paper that they can show friends and relatives, print ads have done little to sell houses, at least for me.

So, what am I spending on to advertise and market the houses that I list? Mainly I spend on the Internet. I've mentioned here before that I run three real estate oriented Web sites -
www.themilfordteam.com, www.MIHomeBuyer.com and www.MoveToMilford.com . I do multiple picture presentations and virtual tours for every listing and I pay extra to get what are called "enhanced listings" on Realtor.com, the premier Web search site for real estate. I looked into Pod casting, but didn't see enough use of that yet to provide any payback. Obviously this blog is real estate oriented too, though admittedly not much of a vehicle to advertise my listings.

Based on feeds of data from my local Multi-List Service (MILS) and from my company (Real Estate One), my listings currently get "pushed" out to over 120 Web sites - everything from large national sites like MSN.com and Trulia.com to local sites like DetNews.com, MIHomeHunt.com and moveinmichigan.com. Through those sites our listings are seen by over 1 billion unique viewers each year. Surely one of them wants to buy the houses that I have listed. Our own company web site www.realestateone.com has now grown in viewer hits to over 85,000 unique visitors a month.

The National Association of Realtors (NAR) has tracked the consistent rise of the use of the Internet for home hunting by buyers. The statistic now stands at 89% of home buyers who claim to have found their home first on the Internet. So, I'm going (and spending) where the buyers are, not where the people who just want to check the sports stats or read the funnies go. I'm trying to figure out what's next in this arena. It appears to be video; but, Podcasasting was also being tauted as the "next big thing" a while back and just didn't take off. I can see video gaining some traction. The real estate world is very visual and people like to see the houses. NAR statistics show that listings with multiple pictures and virtual tours attract more than four as many visitors as those without pictures or with just a single picture. So, video should just add to the attractiveness; so long as it is good video and not a zoomy, blurry, shaky, home-video effort.

So, I'm off on a quest to find a good and inexpensive digital video camera. I'll likely need video editing software too. The opportunities to spend money in real estate just never end. Stay tuned for future reports on my venture into video.