Marketing & Design failures of Real Estate
I passed a real estate sign the other day and noticed there was a YouTube logo on it as well. I thought to myself, how are real estate agents using YouTube to sell properties? Are they video shorts of the agent and company, a slide show of images of the property, or an actual video walkthrough? When I got back to the office and checked out the property in question what I was presented with was best described as the Blair Witch Project – low budget, jiggle-cam, walk-through of the property that gave me a first person perspective of breaking into a home.
The real estate industry is no doubt a very competitive marketplace, lots of agents targeting essentially one market. In my opinion this creates marketing blindness, the feeling of having to go one step further than the competition without identifying the actual goal and executing an effective strategy.
Design in general is a weak point in real estate. A lack of understanding in layout, color, fonts, etc, leads to a mishmash of marketing. Two presentations at this years AIM conference uncovered the fundamentals of design, what works, doesn’t work, and why – Molly Holzshlag of Molly.com - Persuasive Web Design and Design Principles for Non-Designers by Brightwhite Design. In watching these 2 presentations it’s quick to see some of the failures of design in Real Estate.
Other reasons why design and marketing fail in real estate may be;
- too much DIY marketing and design.
- services like Point2Agent that focus more on functionality rather than design and usabilty
- offline overspend and spreading budgets thin across media that has low ROI
- multiple design/marketing vendors which creates a lack of brand consistency across media
Of course poor design isn’t limited to real estate but it is a competitive industry where information for the end user should be presented as quickly and clearly as possible. Here are a few examples of local companies that are doing (a few things) right;
I would have to agree with your statement in general with most industries let alone real-estate. But they are definitely on the low end.
Here are a few examples of what we think are great web sites, they are not specificily real-estate but builders so the subject matter is similar.
http://www.stokesgroup.com/
http://megillhomes.com/
These are good examples of how information should be presented, simple, logical and clear. I particularly like the Stokes Group site. One comment I have is that I find the layout of featured listings on the New Construction page better than what’s on the homepage. The information grouped into a 3×3 block is visually more pleasing and decreases the amount of page scroll.