When your home is on the market, one of the first signs that everything is moving towards a successful sales strategy is seeing a sales listing for your home in a local paper. But while a newspaper ad may give the seller peace of mind, recent trends show that online advertising is more effective than this traditional form of marketing a home.
“Newspapers are still important to the home seller because it represents tangible proof that there is a marketing effort,” said Peter Conti, Jr, Executive VP of Borrell Associates, Inc., an advertising consulting firm. “We forecast that newspapers will see a slight uptick over the next few years as the housing market gets stronger but remember they have sunk so low that this is merely a blip compared to the losses newspapers have sustained.”
The numbers show that newspaper advertising for real estate dropped 34% last year, but is expected to increase 125 this year. However, any increase in newspaper ad spend will be through suburban and community newspapers, which represent a much better buy for the local agent.

For many, newspaper advertising seems to be going the way of the dinosaur, as more prospective buyers are choosing to use the internet to search for properties.

The Gannett Newspaper Group released its 2009 report showing that in its U.S. papers including USA Today, classified ads as a whole were off nearly 20% from the previous year, with real estate ads down 28.4%.

“The trend is clear: Real estate advertisers are looking to reduce their spending in print, and move to other media, including online and direct marketing techniques,” said Jim Townsend, principal of consulting firm Advanced Interactive Media Group / Classified Intelligence. “Newspapers are already beginning to see a significant fall-off in real estate revenue.”

According to Borrell Associates’ most recent forecast, online real estate ads are expected to grow from around the $2.5 billion figure from last year, to more than $3.5 billion in 2012.

In addition, social media sites are generating strong interest among real estate agents as tools for advertising and delivering leads.

“Online advertising continues to dominate the real estate market, reflecting the consumer’s ongoing rapid adoption of the web as a preferred method for researching homes for sale,” Conti said. “Within online real estate advertising, money is moving into marketing activities that do not rely on a media company to bring buyers and sellers together. Thanks to the proliferation of inexpensive database marketing tools and techniques, real estate advertisers are developing direct, one-on-one relationships with their prospects and customers through e-mail marketing, social networking and various promotions and public relations efforts.”

Another development within online advertising is the strong growth of video, which provides real estate shoppers with a much more immersive and compelling experience of the attributes of each unique property.

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