Estate Agents – love them or loathe them they are an integral part of the house-buying process and it’s true to say that they’ve probably saved many a buyer or seller from a nervous breakdown. However, as many industries have embraced online marketing the real estate industry in the UK still seem slow to embrace new media.
Rightmove.co.uk, a leading property portal offers a fantastic range of tools to help visitors with their online home hunting, has become one of the most visited websites on the web in the UK.
Ironically though, the success of Rightmove has perhaps lead to some of it’s users, the actual Estate Agents to rely on it too much for their online presence. Rather than looking at Rightmove and thinking “How could we emulate it’s success on a local basis with our business?” many Estate Agents are happy to sit back with their dated, shoddy websites and assume they’ve got their Internet marketing covered. Wrong.
We took a quick look at some of the websites belonging to Estate Agents in our area and ignoring the large chains who tend to be more marketing savvy, the results were a real eye-opener.
What we experienced was just page after page or self-promotion and ‘marketing White noise’…”We’re professional”, “Free Valuations”, “Experienced staff”…blah, blah, blah. If you removed the logo and company name from each website you would find it almost impossible to tell one website from the next.
It’s like they’ve spent some money on a website just to keep pace with their competitors and that alone is enough – Rightmove can do the rest for them. The trouble is with this attitude is if there are no clear differentiators or USP from one Estate Agent to the next, which one does the unwitting consumer pick to sell their home? Generally the one with the biggest offline marketing budget we’d guess.
Furthermore, aren’t these guys supposed to understand at very least the basics of sales and marketing? If I’m going to entrust the job of finding a buyer for my home (my largest single asset) I want to be confident that the company I instruct are able to promote my property and actually ‘sell’ it rather than just offer it. But how can I have confidence that a company are sales and marketing professionals when they can’t even get the basics right on their own website?
Within just a few seconds we spotted a number of common issues with the marketing on Estate Agents websites with the worst offences being:
- No ‘call to action’ for the visitor other than the ubiquitous ‘contact us’ link.
- No useful tools or fresh, relevant content to engage the visitor.
- No attempt to create authority in their geographical area.
Of the three issues above, the one area we thought was the most blatant loss of an opportunity was the lack of authority when it came to knowing about their ‘patch’. Whilst we have no doubt that most Estate Agents have a detailed knowledge of their area, why do they seem so keen not to share it with their customers?
If we owned an Estate Agency we’d be blogging and commenting daily on everything happening in our area – We’d want to show potential vendors that we had a real empathy with them and their home town. Any time somebody searched for our town in Google, we’d want to see our name associated with every listing on the first page. We’d want potential customers to be in no doubt that we are the local experts.
Considering the huge sums of money Estate Agents throw at advertising in their local paper, it’s perhaps time that many of them channeled some of that money towards their online marketing. If attitudes towards marketing don’t change significantly then many of them will simply cease to exist in the coming years. It’s time for Estate Agents to get their own house in order because their current marketing efforts online are just not good enough.
Tags: Estate Agents, marketing
