Newspaper Real Estate Ads - A Shrinking Resource?

Where are you spending your real estate ad dollars these days? Have you made significant adjustments in the last year or two? And I don't mean just cutting the overall budget, but also moving dollars from print to the Internet? Newspaper ad revenues, depressed last year, are projected by some for a fall of more than 16% this year.

For many years, auto retailers and real estate brokers have been two of the largest customer groups consuming newspaper ad space. When the Internet began to erode that revenue stream, even small papers began to print ads in color at higher prices. Of course, this was appealing to the seller with a home listed, though I don't think there is hard evidence that it did a better job of getting the home sold. In my local area, rural with a weekly newspaper, the paper has back-doored the MLS and is displaying IDX listings framed on their website as an ad for a local franchise. The editor jumped through a lot of hoops, really wanting to get those listings onto the newspaper site, even though no ads are shown on the framed page.

The overall economic climate is part of the problem with declining newspaper ad revenues, but the move to the Internet with real estate marketing is definitely a factor. As we approach the end of the calendar year, many real estate brokerages begin to examine their budgets, and advertising is a major portion for most. What are your thoughts and plans for your brokerage? Do you see results from your Internet efforts? Is money moving from print to the web, or are you just cutting print advertising expense? I know that, in my local market, some of the larger brokerages have been steadily reducing their print budgets. However, I can't see where they are spending much more on the web. In fact, their PPC (Pay Per Click) budgets are definitely down, making it an opportunity market for the smaller brokerage like mine.

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