In practice, advertising a property on the Internet can be costly for real estate professionals.
Publishing real estate ads
The time spent drafting ads as well as the costs associated with listing syndication, a showcase website, technical needs, and search-engine optimization quickly add up.
Writing an ad is a time-consuming, low added-value task that diverts agents from their core business – customer relations.
While the commercial component of a real estate broker’s job includes many tasks, a broker’s priority is always to be available for their clients and spend time with them.
To make sure their ads reach buyers, brokers have them published on hundreds of websites at a time, each with its own pricing policy.
Some websites offer subscriptions while others have less predictable models with a cost per thousand views (CPT), per click (CPC), per lead (CPL), etc.
This process of real estate listing syndication has its own cost as well.
For real estate brokers, having their own showcase website and keeping it up-to-date is also essential.
Website design and maintenance can be expensive, whether these tasks are outsourced or done internally.
Drafting and publishing ads requires a number of technical resources.
In addition to computers, tablets and smartphones, professionals need to invest in a network infrastructure, website hosting, real estate software, data mapping, etc.
- Search-Engine Optimization (SEO)
Optimizing real estate ads to get them to rank high in search engines is a complex, expensive task.
Different strategies can be used to increase a website’s visibility, such as keyword acquisition, copywriting, link building and inbound marketing.
Each of these requires a budget that can be significant – especially when one seeks to rank #1 in search engines.
Writing real estate ads
Drafting ads can take a lot of time, especially when real estate agents keep getting interrupted.
Spontaneous phone calls or visits from buyers and sellers, as well as urgent matters related to on-going sales, often take precedence over this lower-priority task.
Such interruptions increase drafting time and can be detrimental to an ad’s quality.
An integral part of the real estate bidding process, writing ads is tedious work.
While, in theory, every property is unique, describing several one-bedroom apartments or single-family homes in a row can turn out to be repetitive and monotonous.
The inspiration needed to draft varied real estate ads doesn’t always strike.
In France alone, such texts describing real estate properties are duplicated across over 1,000 websites.
Such uniformity causes search engines to consider these ads less relevant than others – if not irrelevant.
Clearly, real estate agents don’t have time to write 1,000 different texts for every single property.
Is there a better way, then?
We think so.
