Real Estate Marketing Strategy

Real Estate Consumer Market Research

Consumer market research is the first step in a systematic approach to marketing. It can help you determine market demand for new products, for existing products, as well as what is the appropriate means to distributing those products. There are many way to gather market research; these include telephone polling and focus group interviews. The only problem is that these traditional methods are:

• Costly
  Traditional market research is costly because you have to prepare a proper study and your sample sizes have to be large enough so you can have confidence in the results.
   
• Biased and Cohersed
  With traditional market research, information gathering is done in an artificial environment. For example, in focus group testing, you may be placed in a room and asked to answer several questions. The most classic example is whne asked whether you would buy a new product... almost everyone says yes... but when put to the task a much smaller percentage of people may actually buy the new product.

Real Estate Marketing Garage Uses Search Engine Market Research

An alternative to traditional market research.
Real Estate Marketing Garage uses market research gathered from search engines. Search engines have the largest consumer database in the world today. comScore research (March 2006) estimates that there are approximately 213,000,000 searches on the internet everyday. People use search engines everyday to look for information, products, etc., at work and in the privacy of their own homes. When searching for what they want, they are not being cohersed and are in their natural environment when looking for products, information, etc.

I'm a realtor. Why do I need to know this and how is this useful?

Large companies use market research everyday to make decisions that impact their bottom line. Home Depot uses demographic information to know where to open their next store. Ford uses demographic information to know what the demand is for their cars, SUVs, minivans or trucks.

As a real estate professional, don't you want to know how your customers look for real estate? Buyers, sellers and renters use the internet as the first resource to search for information on real estate. BUT... how do they search for this information? Do they use the word "real estate" or "home" or "homes" or "property" or "properties" or "condos" or "condominium"? If you knew what real estate consumers were looking for and the difference in the volume of demand for each keyword market, this would formulate your part of your marketing strategy. Let's take a look at an example for how real estate consumers look for real estate in California:

Let's analyze this data together and go through a couple of scenarios.
Remember that this is an example for a California Real Estate Agent.

• Do I use the word house for sale, real estate, or MLS to sell my services?
  According to the data there is an equivalent number of people search for homes using "California houses for sale", "California MLS" and "california Real Estate". If you use all three of these terms then your are diluting your web site by splitting your market focus into 3 markets. Take note that real estate consumers may only ever search with one of these terms, therefore if you don't use the words "house for sale", you will unlikely ever capture that market. A possible strategy might be to have three different web sites that specificaly focus on each of those markets.
   
• Is there a market for Luxury homes in California and how big is it online?
  There are approximately 6,000 searches online for the keyword "California luxury homes". This is about one sixth of the searches for "California Real Estate". This is a market but you will probably have to consider the online competition for this market if you want to take advantage of it.
   
• Is anyone looking specifically for real estate service providers online?
  Absolutely. There are about 8,000 searches for "California Realtor" each month... 4,600 searchs for both "California Realtors" and "California real estate agent"... and 769 searches specifically for relocation services to California.
  
  These are real people search for real estate service providers but what does it mean for you and how can you take advantage of this? The number one rule for search engines is that you have to have these keywords on your web site otherwise you will not even be considered. Thus do you use "Realtor", "Realtors", "Real Estate Agent" or "Relocation Service"? If you currently use the keyword "California Real Estate Agent", you are ignoring 75% of the market looking for real estate providers in California.

We hope that this "California Real Estate" market research example shows you the value of real estate market research and how it can impact your marketing and business strategies. Please keep in mind that this is only a start. Real Estate Marketing Garage can layer competitive information and internal customer behaviour to formulate a winning marketing strategy.

Now click on Web Site Analytics below to see what information we can gather from your web site to again help a proper marketing strategy for you.

	If you would like to discuss how our Real Estate Marketing services can benefit you, please contact us: By using our online contact form By phone at 613-266-9812 Directly by email at info@realestatemarketinggarage.com