2012 Real Estate Ad Spending by Media

So nearly 28% of real estate ad spending goes to newspaper and 24% goes to online, according to Media Ad View Plus, but where are home buyers actually looking for homes? According to National Association of Realtors in their 2012 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers, “nine in 10 home buyers today rely on the internet as one of their primary research sources, and 52 percent turn to the web as their first step.”  As you can see below, while 90% of home buyers might use Internet as a primary research source, the National Association of Realtors reports that only 27% use newspaper ads.

• Internet: 90%
• Real estate agent: 87%
• Yard sign: 53%
• Open house: 45%
• Newspaper ad: 27%
• Home book or magazine: 18%

In a joint study by National Association of Realtors and Google, entitled The Digital House Hunt: Consumer and Market Trends in Real Estate, they found that 89% of new home shoppers used a mobile search engine and that 68% used a mobile application throughout their research process.

Not surprisingly, given the National Association of Realtors and Google’s findings, online advertising spending is expected to grow rapidly.  By 2017, online is expected to be the medium of choice for real estate, with nearly 41% of the advertising pie, according to Media Ad View Plus. Meanwhile, newspaper’s share of the real estate advertising pie is expected to decline, reaching less than 7% by 2017. Mobile is also expected to benefit from the newspaper industry’s continuing decline, as its share increases from 1% to 12.6%.

2017 Real Estate Ad Spending by Media

BIA/Kelsey is projecting online’s revenue share to start surpassing newspaper’s in the Real Estate vertical in 2013.

More information on Media Ad View Plus is available here.

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The 360-degree views of real estate listings were remarkable for their time, but are giving way to new technology that lets users look at many things at once, says Microsoft Live Labs Technical Fellow Gary Flake, who was speaking last week at Inman’s Real Estate Connect in San Francisco.

“We’re used to Web navigating from one image to another,” especially with video games, said Flake. Microsoft’s PhotoSynth technology lets users zoom in and out of backyards to bedrooms, etc. It is the same technology used by CNN for the Obama inauguration, he notes.

Indeed, Photo Synth, combined with Pivot, a program for collecting information, creates new experiences and allows you to embed them within your own Web site. “It will make you want to change the ways you take photos to take into how you stitch together hundreds of things,” said Flake.

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