The new property buyer is the first generation born into a world where technology is omnipresent, with smartphones and social media an indispensable part of everyday life. Property search and social media are merging with buyers now spending 80 times more on social media than they do on property portals.
Right now, with an oversupply of buyers and an undersupply of properties on offer, real estate agents are enjoying a boom time but agents with an eye on the future and vivid memories of times that were not so buoyant, are seeking new ways to be prepared and are riding the wave of success offered by connecting through social media without relying on traditional portal traffic which is both expensive and rapidly becoming outdated.
The dilemma for agents is how to reach the new socially savvy buyers and sellers without saturating their own social audience and employing a ‘spray and pray’ method of marketing.
Realty Technology Labs, a part of Realty Media Group, has been working over the past 2 and half years to develop hundreds of local social audiences in Australia. Presently reaching property buyers and sellers in 9,000 Australian suburbs by harnessing the power of over 600 local Facebook pages, RMG enables its 7,500 agencies to enjoy the benefits of instantly publishing all of their new listings to a highly targeted geo-
based audience in specific areas.
The strategy has been so successful the company has just posted it’s 500,000 th property post. Realty’s CEO and Founder, Troy Rushton, revealed that Realty is able to post up to 5,000 social posts a day because the posts are being distributed to over 600 pages not 1 or 2. “That would turn people off!” he said.
“It has always been our goal to be a distributor of property information and opportunities and so Realty was built to do just that. We do not simply load available properties onto a website and then attract an audience to see it on the portal. Sure we do that but we also take the properties to where the people are – on social” Rushton said.
“Although Realty has a website which is currently attracting over one million impressions a month, realty.com.au is just a part of the offering from the Realty platform which provides agents the ability to reach buyers and sellers totally differently and even have direct communication with clients by using the company’s revolutionary chat
facilities on the Realty App.” he said.
Rushton summed up “It makes sense for agents to present their seller’s properties to the largest social property audience in the country. There are currently over 15 million people a month using Facebook. That is where Realty lives and it is working!”