Where Is Your Real Estate Website in Your Marketing Plan & Budget?

Every year I look forward to my copy of the NAR Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers. The 2008 copy is out, and I want to share some data with you about how buyers found the home they ultimately purchased. We're talking about how they first located their ultimate purchase. And, the data asks two types of buyers, those who used the Internet for home searches, and those who didn't.

By also asking those who didn't use the Internet for home searches, we would hope to get a more balanced picture of the value to both types of buyer of both websites and traditional media. Here are some results:

• Of those who used the web, 37% found the home they bought there, while, of course, those who didn't search on the Web wouldn't have found it there.
• 33% who used the Internet found their home through a real estate agent.
• 38% of those who didn't use the Web found their home through a real estate agent.
• Only 2% who used the Internet found the home they purchased in a newspaper advertisement.
• Newspaper ads were somewhat more valuable to the non-Web user, as 4% of them found their home there.
• Only 1% of both Internet and non-Internet users found their home in a home book or magazine.
• 83% of those who used the Internet ended up using a Realtor to purchase their home.

I'm not trying to put print media out of business, though some major newspapers are going that way right now. Your concern needs to be the return on investment of your marketing dollars. And, the data says that the Internet is very valuable to home buyers. Also, the huge majority of those Internet searchers ended up using a Realtor. There's two very important points here:

• Realtors are still very valuable to the home buyer.
• Web searches are the primary tool of home buyers.

So, it would be logical to assume that they are definitely locating properties on the Internet, but what can we assume about how they found the ultimate choice for a real estate professional? Unfortunately, there isn't any data to tell us the percentage of Realtors chosen from their web presence, at least not for buyers.

My opinion is that the Internet has become extremely important to the home buyer, but they are still using Realtors for the purchase. It is only logical that we want to present an effective and useful web presence to attract that buyer to our services. Yes, many will still choose the personal referral route, but we need to be very aware that the Web is growing as a marketing force, while traditional media are shrinking. Where are you spending your marketing dollars?