90% of All Home Buyers searched for their Homes on the Internet

NAA Auctioneers, www.auctioneers.org, and Satellite ProLink, www.spl1.com, have been shifting thier ad promotions to the Internet for over four years. See more interesting facts (below) from a recent article posted on National Association of Realtors, in support of this move.



REALTORS® Moving More of Their Ad Spend Online


The facts are in, and they continue to show that the smartest and most successful agents and brokers are shifting ever-larger amounts of their advertising and promotional dollars from print to the Internet.


For example, 90% of REALTORS® say that online marketing is important or extremely important to their success, and 90% of all home buyers say they searched for homes on the Internet, and more specifically on REALTOR.com®, while only 12% of all home buyers say they looked for their new homes in newspaper or magazine ads.


According to the National Association of REALTORS®, overall ad spending by REALTORS® totals about $12 billion per year, of which about $3 billion is now spent online and about $5 billion is still spent on newspaper advertising. But newspaper advertising by REALTORS® is declining by about 20% per year, while the industry’s Internet spending has been skyrocketing, and the trend shows no sign of stopping.


According to a recent survey by newspaper analyst firm Classified Intelligence, 19% of REALTORS® surveyed now spend less than 20% of their total budgets on newspaper print ads, another 36% of the REALTORS® spend 10% or less of their total advertising budgets in newspapers, and a whopping 17% of REALTORS® don’t advertise in print newspapers at all!


A separate Inman News survey recently found that 18% of REALTORS® surveyed said they planned to spend more than $10,000 to market themselves and their listings online in the next year, while approximately 40% planned to spend between $1,000 and $5,000 for that purpose, and only 20% planned to spend less than $1,000 online.


This shift in spending from offline to online media makes great sense, not only because online spending can be tracked back to actual inquiries, showings, and sales more quickly and more accurately than offline spending, but because the Internet is where the largest numbers of the most active buyers and most willing sellers can be found.