Is Your Plano Real Estate Website in Your Marketing Plan & Budget?

 

Every year I get my copy of the local Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers. This year I want to share some data with you about how buyers are finding Plano homes that they ultimately purchased. I am talking about how they first started their home search that resulted in them finding the home they ultimately purchased. The data takes into consideration two types of buyers: those who used the Internet for home searches, and those who didn't. This included both regular and . By also asking those who didn't use the Internet for home searches, we hope to get a more balanced picture of the value to both types of buyer of both websites and traditional “regular” media. Here are some of the results:

 

 

• 83% of those who used the Internet ended up using to purchase their home.

 

• Of those who used the Internet, 37% found the home they bought on the web.

 

• 33% who used the Internet found their home through a professional Realtor.

 

• 38% of those who didn't use the Web found their home through a professional real estate agent.

 

• 2% who used the Internet found the home they purchased in a newspaper print advertisement.

 

• Only 1% of both Internet and non-Internet users found their home in a real estate book or home magazine.

 

You can see trend is clearly moving from traditional marketing to online marketing. One of your main concerns should be the return on investment of your marketing dollars. And, the data shows that the Internet is a very useful tool for home buyers. Also, the huge majority of those Internet home searchers ended up using a Realtor to assist them in their purchase. There are two very important points to be made here:

 

• Internet searches are the primary tool of today’s home buyers.

 

• Realtors are still very valuable to the home buyer and the home buying process.

 

It would be logical to assume that home buyers are definitely searching and locating homes on the Internet, but what can we assume about how they found the ultimate choice for a real estate professional? Unfortunately, there isn't any data to tell us the percentage of real estate agents chosen from their web presence. My opinion is that the Internet has become an extremely important tool to the home buyer, but they are still using real estate agents for their purchase. It is logical that we want to present an effective and useful Internet presence to attract buyers to use our services. Yes, many will still choose the personal referral route, but we all need to be aware that the Internet is growing as an extremely strong marketing force, while traditional media is shrinking. This means more and more of your marketing dollars should be going to your online marketing budget.