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The Death of Traditional Real Estate Marketing(And the Rise of Your Real Estate Career)

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There was a day – not too long ago – when real estate agents wielded much power.

Picture this ...

You’re a real estate agent. You have a couple years under your belt and a tidy office with a desk in a respected brokerage.

It’s 1993. We’re one year away from property listings being publicly available on the Internet, and eight years before IDX allowed agents and brokers to display MLS data on their own sites.

Life is good.

A typical day for you looks like this: You wake up at 6:30, brush your teeth, jog around the neighborhood, shower, dress, eat breakfast, drop the children off at school and stroll into your office.

You prep your desk and phone and for the next two hours cold call a list of prospects your broker handed you yesterday.

You talk to three people, scratch some notes on company letterhead and make an appointment for a listing presentation the following Thursday.

You run out around noon to grab lunch with a client, then spend the rest of the afternoon driving her around looking at homes.

You make it back to the office around six, check your voice mail and get another lead. Somebody wants to buy a house. They want to know if you can help. They don’t have a clue where to start.

Of course you can help.

You are the gatekeeper.


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The Traditional Real Estate Business Model

Before IDX and public access to real estate listings, the only way someone could find out the latest inventory of homes for sale was to go directly to a real estate agent who carried around the Big Book.

That book was updated weekly and monthly and was the only way to access the latest available inventory. That book was a gold mine. It was your major value-add as a real estate agent.

And here’s the thing: you didn’t have to be online – because there was no “online”.

In that landscape you listed homes and then promoted them to be seen by the greatest number of potential buyers using traditional marketing techniques.

For example, you’d use:

• Yard signs

• Entry into the Multiple Listing Service (MLS)

• Host broker open houses

• Classified ads in the newspaper

• Nickel magazines

• Home magazines

• Direct mail

These were the typical approaches, and the typical entry points in which prospects came to you. These methods didn’t come cheap, but if you didn’t do these things


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your home would sit on the market for months, eventually expiring, and you’d lose the commission.

Losing a commission sucks.

There were also all the methods you’d use to promote your business. These traditional marketing methods included:

• Letter of introduction

• Mailings

• Letters

• Cards

• Personal brochure

• Market reports

• Just Sold or Just Listed postcards

• Holiday cards

• Personal newsletter

• Recipe cards

• Property alerts

• Real estate news or articles

• Community calendars

• Service directories

• Promotional items


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• Thank you or “Thinking of you” cards

• Telephone calls

• Birthday cards

• Mother’s Day cards

• Father’s Day cards

In his book The Millionaire Real Estate Agent, Gary Keller promoted a program he called “The 33 Touches” using the techniques mentioned above. His program was designed to:

• Move prospects through your marketing funnel

• Keep your funnel full of potential repeat and referral business

As you can imagine, this kind of marketing can be very expensive, very quickly. Not to mention the fact that you were constantly interrupting and annoying invaluable prospects. But, if you wanted to be a successful real estate agent – if you wanted to be a millionaire agent – NOT investing in these marketing methods was unthinkable.

You were in a battle to remain relevant in the consumer’s mind. You had to market using the tools available.

Let me show you what I mean ...


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One of the most startling points from Keller’s research on mindshare is illustrated in the fact that 92% of sellers will list their home with the first or second agent they meet.

On the buyer side that number drops, but only to 81%.

Here’s one way to think about it: real estate is a battle. A battle to get in front – and stay in front – of your prospects. A battle in which the moment you let that expensive pressure off the marketing pedal, your competitors gain ground and mind share – while you lose it.

Sellers Buyers

76% 59%16%

8%

Everyone Else

Two Agents

One Agent

Everyone Else

Two Agents

One Agent

19%

22%

Earning Mindshare


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It’s a costly battle, but well worth it. Keller noted in his research that in the database of warm leads his program yielded 2 deals for every 12 people marketed to. That amounts to a 17% response rate.

Let’s look at the numbers. If you have 500 people in your database, then you have 85 chances to close a sale. But will those people actually work with you?

Well, that depends again on mindshare. Were you the first or second agent they met? If so, then your chances are pretty good. And let’s say the average fee for a sale is $6,000. If you had a 100% success rate, then you could gross $464,000.

But even if your success rate was only 50%, you could still rake in $232,000 in a year. Not too shabby for working a list of 500 names.

Life pre-IDX was truly grand.

That Party is Over and You Need A New Value-Proposition

We are living in the “Information Age.”

Want to know the length of the Golden Gate Bridge? Where the Singapore stock market closed last night? Flights leaving for Costa Rica this Sunday?

Jump on the Internet. Search. And in less than sixty seconds you can have your answer.

The Information Age: Good for consumers. Bad for real estate agents.

Looking for a single-family house in San Antonio? A 2-bedroom condo in D.C.? Waterfront lot in Fargo, North Dakota?

The listings on Google will scroll page after page. The very listings that used to be in that Big Book you had exclusive access to.


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It would be an understatement to say that the Internet turned the real estate business on its head. More precisely, the public availability of real estate listings online ravaged the industry as it was.

The single advantage you had is gone. You are no longer the gatekeeper. You’ve lost your monopoly on the information, and it’s never coming back.

Let me repeat that, because it’s critical that you understand: the exclusive advantage you had before the rise of the Internet is never coming back.

This changes your work day.

Your morning routine remains the same (jog, brush teeth, drop children off at school). What changes is what you do at the office. Your first mistake would be to pick up that phone and call that list your broker gave you.

How to Reach Home Buyers Today

OK, you’ve taken the bad news. Now, let’s move confidently into the realm of what actually works today.

See, it’s not just the technology that’s changed. The people you’re marketing to have changed.

Ninety-four percent of consumers start their home search online. That’s huge. But the next number is even more significant to you: ninety-six percent of first-time home buyers start their home search online.

And here’s the deal: According to the National Association of Realtors, the average age of first time home buyers in the United States is thirty-one.

That’s the Millennials. The Echo Boomers. Generation Next. Generation Y. The Net Generation.


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The size of this generation won’t allow you to ignore them. At 80 million strong it’s massive, representing the largest generation in the United States since the Baby Boomers.

Naturally we might wonder if they actually have the purchasing power to buy a home. The answer is yes – according to the 2012 comScore report “Next-Generation Strategies for Advertising to Millennials.”

These folks are carrying the purchasing power of roughly $170 billion around in their messenger bags and electric cars.

They’re even willing to make hard sacrifices in order to buy a home – getting a second job or living with parents. And keep in mind, buying a home is the number one indicator of success to this age group.

These people want to buy homes.

Millenials not only have the desire, but the purchasing power to buy a home. Are you prepared to win them over?

Having grown up in the digital and information ages, you have to wonder if the traditional marketing methods (Keller’s 33 Touches, for example) will work.

The answer is definitively, no.

Millenials use their phones to text, surf the Internet, update social networks, and listen to music – not to make phone calls, let alone return a phone call to a real estate agent.

Your strategy of getting in front of them has to be different.


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You Can’t Claim Expertise, You Have to Demonstrate It

The moral of the story is this: traditional marketing techniques usually land on deaf ears these days. The information and digital age satisfies our quest for information, and lowers our attention spans.

We are willing to do the research to find a home and not rely on a real estate agent. But that’s not all they’re looking for.

Potential home buyers also want information about the local community. They want lifestyle information, information on the best schools in the area, the best neighborhoods to live in, interest rates, how to secure a loan, and market trends.

Basically, they’re looking to gather as much information about the local market in order to determine whether it’s actually a place they want to live.

A simple house listing isn’t going to give them that information. It’s going to take more and it’s got to be sophisticated.

A survey by Better Homes & Gardens Real Estate released on October 22, 2012 stated:

More than three-quarters (77 percent) of the Gen X & Y Americans surveyed believe that they have become increasingly knowledgeable about home ownership due to increased media coverage that has magnified real estate topics throughout the past six years.

In addition, sixty-nine percent believe that the recent housing downturn has made them more knowledgeable about home ownership than their parents were at their age. The Gen X and Y members are doing their homework before making one of the biggest investments of their lives.


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In other words, your reputation and position as an expert is slipping.

How to Build A Reputation That Grows Your Business

Besides, it’s no secret that real estate agents are one of the least trusted professions … just below car salesmen and lawyer. And that reputation will only worsen if you churn out a cheap, brochure type website.

Tech-savvy home buyers don’t want to look at a hype-filled website that looks like a brochure pitching your services and saying very little of the community, or how the market is doing.

And they do not care that you were last year’s top producer.

The modern real estate consumer only cares about a website has the information that they’re looking for. They only care if can they trust the site. They only care if it will quickly, simply, and faithfully answer their questions that they have about the area, and about the home buying process.

Here’s the good news in all of this ...

This new generation of home buyers appear to be highly engaged with the content that they choose to view, with website content that is created properly.


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How to Harness the Nearly-Unlimited Power of Content Marketing

Listen. The traditional real estate marketing model may be broken. The industry might be plagued with consumer skepticism. You might have reputation issues. Your phone might rarely ring. You might be the last person anyone thinks about when it comes time to buy a house. Your marketing budget might be bankrupt.

Don’t worry. If you’re willing to do the work, life as a real estate agent can be very good again.

You can dominate your market. You can rise above the noise. Position yourself as the top authority in your market. Obtain and maintain first contact with the consumer in the real estate transaction.

And you can do this for a fraction of the traditional marketing expense.

You’ll discover how to do all this in the next installment of this sequence. It’s an audio interview with Brian Clark – one of the most respected and successful content marketing experts online – that contains interesting details about his real estate career, the role content marketing played in his success, and some of the primitive tools he used.

He’ll also lay out a marketing plan that just might save your real estate career ...

Stay tuned.

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