Real estate content is a marketing goldmine. But those closest to it seem unable to pick up a shovel.
Let me explain.
HGTV reaches nearly 100 million households with dozens of shows featuring people buying property, selling property, improving property or renting property. This is not all “celebrity cribs” crap, either. A lot of it involves ordinary people and ordinary homes.
They’ve even unearthed some of the most compelling personalities in real estate. They make great content too.
Curbed, which started out as a photo-rich blog about New York real estate, is now a successful national media site that gathers an audience by mining real estate content. Features like a “House of the Day” e-newsletter and post after post filled with real estate photos (some of which are extracted from other media sites built on top of real estate content!) are the foundation of this business.
And then there’s Zillow. They rock at this sort of thing. Their sweet spot seems to be celebrity real estate, a genre I believe to be a sign of some sort of coming cultural apocalypse. But that’s just me. The bottom line is they create this stuff because it works.
My email box turns up these Zillow subject lines over the past few months:
No Turkeys Here! See Celebrity Kitchens
See the Places Tech Titans Call “Home”
But also:
Sold! A Look Back at 2010’s Most Expensive Real Estate Sales
Boo! See the Top 10 Haunted Homes in the U.S.
These emails create engagement. Even I opened the last two. Pulled from the real estate content goldmine, they practically write themselves.
What are you sitting on?
You see where I’m going with this: The people who create real estate content in the first place, and in some cases own it, sit idle while others exploit its value.
They stand to lose mind share, consumer engagement and, ultimately, relevance.
The answer does not lie in attacking companies like those I mention above. The answer is to get your act together and start leveraging the content that sits at your feet.
Where’s your “Cool kitchens of Houston” e-newsletter? Your “Best deals in San Diego blog?” Your “Boston Backyards” tumblr site? How about a section on your home page called “Palaces of Dallas” where the user is invited to view the most expensive homes on the market?
Right now you’re like a New York City department store with no windows, a Sushi place without the little plastic food in the window.
Hiding your goods from the marketplace. Failing to use their power to engage.
If you’re a brokerage of any size, you have tons of content to play with. You have access to an IDX feed. And, I would imagine, a camera.
There’s no excuse. No, not even MLS rules.
We have argued before that every real estate brokerage and brand should think of itself as a media company. That’s not easy, of course. But it’s necessary.
Because this much is clear: the real estate industry can’t absorb too many more missed opportunities.
Local, Mobile, Social and the future of real estate
20 Tools to Bring your Real Estate Business to the Cloud
15 Ways to Make Your Marketing Mobile
Hey Brian, Thank you for the great content suggestions! I recently moved into the “real estate marketing” arena from a very narrow ecommerce niche and could not agree with you more. The real estate industry is a marketers dream scenario…there is an abundance of good content out there. Get your shovel and start digging!
As you know, Brian, researching, writing, and producing content like this is extremely time-consuming. But, our audience loves it and it begs to be written. We will continue to mine our data for stories like the ones you mention above and give our users fun, off-beat content in addition to our hard-hitting analysis on the housing market. Thanks for the post.
Content marketing is nothing new, expect that it’s one more item on the long list that realtors fail to recognize. In his best selling book, The New Rules Of Marketing and PR, David Meerman Scott, does a great job explaining the benefits of content. The NAR had him as their conventions keynote speaker a few years ago, and obviously few agents got the message.
To those that hate the status-quo and see things from a different perspective than the average realtor, there is a whole new world out there, and the chance to grab major market share, while everyone else is asleep at the wheel.
Diane, sure it’s time consuming to put things together, but so what. The world is different and sales aren’t just going to be handed to Realtor’s on a silver platter like that have in the past. Those days are over. Now you have to show how smart you are, and that’s going to be tough for most agents, because they have trouble even writing an intelligent listing description, let alone creating more complex content. So the field will be wide open to those who see the future and do what it takes.
I love that Realtors have every excuse for not doing something different, and that’s why they’re stuck in an outdated approach of free listings, lawn signs, and a few open house…and stupid brochures that hardly anyone will ever see.
How does an entire industry fail to recognize that they never get to have a conversation with 99% of the people who see their online listings, thus making the online presentation even more important. If you fail to stand out online, then you’ll fail.
The future…it’s all about quality marketing, not those stupid listings, and being where all the buyers are.
Time to start looking at it from the consumers pov, because they sure as hell don’t like what we’ve been giving them.
Brian, about curbed…they may have readers, but they don’t have a product to sell, so I bet they don’t make money. I’m also going to bet that they creat a majority of their content…you don’t consistently pull great copy from the web. They have a very specific formula that no one else has. I love their site, and its exactly what brokerage should be doing. It’s another example of the brokerages being asleep at the wheel.
I wonder what the head of Realogy is making to seemingly sit on his hands all day. The biggest franchise around and they’re clueless. Entrepreneurs beat them every time at their own game.
Maybe curbed should do a buyout.
Other than how brokerages perceive themselves, does their business model have any true value? Other than their spin, I don’t see their value proposition. On paper, there’s nothing.
Great post, but you’re preaching to a brick wall.
Hi Steve-Awesome could not have said it better myself. I would love to chat further with you as I sure could use someone to bang ideas around with. Not sure what you do or who you work with but we have started a small company up in the boone docks of northern vermont and are constantly reevaluating our idea/message and what folks really want out of the real estate industry. When we first started back in Sept 2010 I thought we had a novel idea, I question it daily and would love someone who thinks like you do to share a thought or two with us.
Thank you!
Chris
chris@coollemonade.com
Although it is time-consuming to create content for your websites, there are some other options out there. There are several freelance writers that will create exceptional content at a very reasonable price.
Either way, great post and great advice. These things are essential for all Real Estate websites.
[...] Subscribe to RSS « The Real Estate Content Goldmine [...]
[...] 1000 Watt blog, Brian Boero offers some suggestions about writing blog posts based on content that agents already have. They’re sitting on a goldmine, he contends, and it’s time to step up to the plate and [...]
Great article.
Content is not that hard to make once you just decide to. I basically use all of Scottsdale as my content. Not just real estate but restaurants, events you name it.
When I came into Real Estate I already was a media company because I was a successful blogger in the fashion and beauty area and so it was natural to just use all the same techniques but applied to a different medium.
Video content merged with blog content its whats for me in 20011.
[...] Real Estate Marketing Ideas Posted on January 25, 2011 by Marta Walsh I read a great article today aimed at REALTOR’s exposing them to the idea of creating web content as a tool to help themselves. If you look around http://www.martawalsh.com you will see exactly that. The full article is here. [...]