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Agents should be providing a detailed online marketing schedule to their vendors, giving the online medium the same importance as print, a senior figure from a property listings website has said.
“When presenting a marketing pitch to a vendor a lot of agents will provide quite a detailed schedule for the newspaper, but their online schedule will not be very detailed,” REA Group general manager of sales and operations, Arthur Charlaftis, told Real Estate Business.
“They’ll say, ‘we’ll put you online’, and then it’ll be a function of what the agent thinks that should look like.”
Mr Charlaftis said the growing expectations of vendors will force agents to provide an in-depth summary of online advertising campaigns.
“Vendors are consumers, and most who are actually selling are usually buying [as well],” he said. “So they look at the [online] site as a purchaser as well as a seller, and their requirements and expectations on agents are going to increase.”
“So I think over time [agents] are going to find they’ll be doing a detailed schedule in terms of online [advertising] for the vendor, and that is going to be a competitive advantage for the agents who move quickly.
What an online advertising schedule should look like will depend on the level of exposure a vendor wants.
"Some of the agents we’ve got who are quite innovative online do take quite a strong presence, so what they do is they’ll do banner advertising, they’ll take...a feature location, and in addition to that what they’ll do is take a high level premier [spot], so the first or second page of the website is dominated with their branding as well.
"They almost see [online] as not dissimilar to a newspaper...[they] actually look at what consumers are visioning [sic] when they look at the page.
"But that is a more mature way at looking [at] online than what most [agents] do."
