The Online Marketing Difference:

RISMEDIA, May 22, 2009

The news from the NAR annual survey is in; average age of members rose, sales fell, membership fell, income fell. Only 73% of agents were “very certain” that they’d stay in the business for another two years (and that is down from last year, too). Of course, the reported $36,700 median income level includes all those new (two years and under) agents who averaged around $8,600 for their toil and those seasoned (16 year) veterans who averaged $53,900. When the majority of members can’t earn a decent living in their chosen field, that field is in real jeopardy, and so is that membership. Even garbage collectors earn between $35,000 and $80,000 a year.

 

Paul Bishop, managing director for real estate research for NAR was quoted as saying “Almost all of our members have secondary business specialties and are diversified in their income streams- some are involved in related businesses.” I would think they would have to be involved in earning an income somewhere other than real estate if real estate incomes are so puny.

 

Capping off this report were many more facts, but the one that stands out for me is this one: “Members say that they received only four buyer or seller inquiries from their personal Internet site over the past year, which accounted for just 3% of their business.”

 

 

Traditional Agents Earn $36,700 Annually; Internet Agents Earn $100,000+ Annually.

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Folks, the bad news in the first paragraph is directly related to the bad news in the third paragraph. It is common knowledge that agents who have made the transition to being Internet real estate agents continue to make six figures, and that knowledge is supported by our customer database. They are prospecting exactly where the homebuyer is looking today: online. Those agents receive about 80% of their leads and their business from the Internet. What is the basis of this huge disparity in income and success levels?

 

Traditional buyer vs. Internet buyer

 

In February of 2007, an article titled “Online Marketing: Internet Buyer vs. Traditional Home Buyer Study: The Real Estate World is Changing Even Faster Than You Think!” was published online and in print. I wrote that article utilizing the facts as determined by the California Association of Realtors® in their 2006 study on the subject. The article was quite popular, was heavily quoted and reprinted by other leading publications, as well as being distributed by some state real estate trade groups to their members (write me and I will send you a reprint, free). That article patiently explained how the paradigm for buying a home had irrevocably changed.

It was a call to action for the agents and brokers looking to catch the wave that is online marketing for realtors. Now, two years later, it is apparent that not enough agents and brokers were paying attention. When NAR reports that 80+% of residential real estate sales begin online, yet the average agent says that online sales only account for 3% of their business, what is going on in the field? What a huge disconnect! It appears that 80% of all buyers are not finding the traditional real estate agent (as defined in NAR’s 2008 survey). Who, then, do those 80% of buyers go to? They go to the agent who paid attention two years ago. They go to the Internet real estate agent.

Who is this “Internet Real Estate Agent?”

The “Internet Real Estate Agent” has many faces. The agent can be a grandmother from Amarillo, a real estate couple from California, an immigrant from Europe who settled here, a fourth generation Texan, a native New Mexican, a seasoned Carolina professional, a resort specialist in the Turks and Caicos Islands, a big thinker from New Brunswick or a Massachusetts contrarian-or hundreds of other iterations of the North American real estate agent-the profile is as diverse as the membership of NAR. 

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