Urban Development Institute Pacific Region hosted a breakfast earlier this month for the real estate community. The panel of speakers discussed the impact of online media on the real estate industry. Below are my notes from that morning.
David Allison, partner Braun-Allison, began the day with a quote that I often use, “start small, start now.” David can be found on Twitter with similar musings, but his presentation looked at many points that he makes in his book Sell the Truth, which is his roadmap to selling real estate.
Some of David Allison’s highlights included the 5 trends:
- People want more info about everything. (MT: True. We want to know where our apple came from, if it is organic. We want to know if the coffee is fair trade. There’s lots of info we want to know about purchases that are in the $1-4 range. The real estate industry needs to provide prospective buyers more than a snapshot and a couple of bullet points and marketing speak if they want our $1 million.)
- Dialogue is expected. (MT: Yes. Speak with your human voice, not your PR spin voice.)
- People are searching for authenticity, transparency, and openness.
- Traditional ads are working less effectively.
- Social media is growing.
What David Allison particularly nailed was that real estate marketing is about branding and word of mouth, and, if you want the sales, you have to win the cocktail conversation, meaning that you have to give your buyers the facts so that they are confident in their purchase and are able to defend (or sing its praises) when questioned by their peers. As I like to say, “advertising doesn’t tell me what to buy. Advertising tells me what is available to buy. My friends tell me what I want to buy.”
And that is the missing formula. How can real estate developers generate word of mouth through social media?
Allison definitely gets it, and each of the speakers talked about the ingredients, but no one really explained how to bring it all together. What do you add when? How much time do you allocate for each? How do you use social media in this business context? The audience was already sold on why they needed to add social media to the mix. And if they weren’t, the next speaker was Hanson Lok of Ipsos.
Lok had all sorts of interesting stats on who does what online and for how long, but most interesting to the real estate audience was the following.
When asked about where they hear about real estate:
- 39% of those polled said print sources
- 15% said online
BUT those numbers are how they first heard about real estate opportunities.
When we are at the research and decision stage:
- 46% report online as their source for finding information about a development
- 36% say a real estate agent
And when asked about what sources they trust:
- 34% said the real estate agent
- 28% reported online sources
Amielle Lake of Tagga Media also proffered some numbers. People report spending 2 hours a week on real estate research if they are in the market. Mobile gives you access 24/7 (assuming you have a smartphone).
My favourite stat: 65% report that they will not share their phone with their spouse. In addition, lost wallets are reported within 26 hours, whereas lost mobiles are reported within 68 minutes.
Lake also talked about the conversation funnel, which provided some of the “formula” to generating word of mouth and using social media for real estate.
Imagine a funnel, or upsidedown pyramid. You have a lot of people you can reach at the wide mouth of the funnel. Here you are creating awareness, typically through online and print. But with Tagga Media, you can also add text codes to your signage and mobile websites for on-the-road property listing checks.
Moving down the conversation funnel is where you try to generate demand. Testimonials, word of mouth, share functions, price and time-based sales are your marketing tools here.
I’d suggest for creating awareness and generating demand that companies also consider share functions on their websites. I’d ask real estate developers to consider their property website:
- Is it easy for a spouse to share a found listing via email?
- Is the URL unique or is the site all flash based?
- What and how are you using Twitter, Facebook and email to regularly connect to those potential buyers who are researching for 2 hours a week?
- Do you have printable versions of the listings? PDFs or 1-page summaries?
- Can people favourite listings on your site or annotate page they want to come back to?
- Can you send them personalized notes through permission-based marketing?
Next step is, of course, measuring demand, and that is dependent on forward thinking in advance of a campaign. Do you know how many Facebook followers you had before your outreach? Do you have analytics installed on your site? Are you filtering out your own traffic?
Further down the funnel is the qualify stage. In real estate, this is online registration forms and in-person events. These points of engagement help determine interest level, and ideally lead us to the narrow end of the funnel, which is the sale, 1-to-1 conversation.
And that’s the one to many, and many to many funnel that leads to a one to one. But what happens after that sale? It seems, as an outsider, that once a sale has been made, the online conversation with that buyer becomes mute. And that’s a loss, especially if you follow Allison’s nod to winning the dinner party argument.
Look beyond what everyone else sees.
That small group of buyers can become your biggest fan. They’ve already bought in. Their word of mouth is golden.
If the property is in development, report on the construction through a blog and encourage buyers to log in and comment. Take photos of delivery and move in day. Celebrate that online. Ask for testimonials and post them publicly (with permission, of course). Use social media to create excitement and to entice the next sale. People want neighbours like them.
Chris Breikss of 6S Marketing weighed in with some tactical tools and how-to tips. Most interesting to me was some of the numbers related to engagement. It’s always hard to compare your campaigns to a competitor’s without insider knowledge of their budget, time, and strategy. But the numbers are interesting markers nonetheless.
In talking about Hootsuite, Chris showed us the weekly stats, 224 total clicks in 7 days, on his account.
He also presented a quick case study on Opus Hotel, which had good reviews but needed more reservations. Their Facebook campaign managed to generate some interest and they have 2500+ fans. They do ads to promote events, all of which target their desired demographic.
In the summer, they ran a campaign, “Sleep Where the Stars Sleep.” They invited followers to post to the Facebook page and between June 22 and July 24, they had 41 photos posted, 275 likes and 337 comments.
More case studies like this would have certainly helped the audience understand what to expect from social media. Regardless, it was a well-rounded panel with a lot of expertise to share. Thanks to those panelists and UDI for the breakfast event, and to Katherine at Sotheby’s for inviting me along.
