What Percentage Start Home Search Online
What percentage of consumers start their home search online is a question I get all the time. Whether I am talking with an individual real estate agent or speaking in front of a group. I am a former business development manager [title rep] for a national title insurance company in Phoenix Arizona. I spent the last 10 years helping real estate professionals, REALTORS and Loan Officers grow their business. Now I work at PRO-Found Marketing, where we help professionals get found – online.
Back in the day, agents used postcards and flyer’s and cold calls and door to door and billboards and grocery cart ads and bus stop ads and… and. and. to grow their business. It’s sad to say, but there are still a lot [and when I say a lot, I mean a lot] of agents still doing the same thing. I know because I still receive their horrible, sad, confusing “its all about me” marketing in my mailbox. If they only knew. If they only knew that the majority of consumers start their home search online, they may “shift” their marketing. “Dude, what the “majority”? I hear you saying – 90%. Here is a stat I recently heard – 90% of consumers start their home search online, but 96% of 1st time home buyers start their home search online. Wondering what the discrepancy between 90% and 96% is? Echo Boomers AKA Millennials, AKA Generation Next, Millennial Generation, Net Generation, Generation Y. Regardless of what you call them, don’t “call” them. They don’t like to be “called”. They all have phones but they are more likely to use them to text, surf the Internet or update a social network than they are to actually make a call or return one for that matter. The Echo Boomers are 80 million strong and represent the largest generation since the baby boomers. They grew up with technology and are extremely comfortable with it. They are called “Echo Boomers”, because of the large increase in birth rates through the 1980s and into the 1990s. They are children of Baby Boomers. According to NAR, the average age of 1st time home buyers is 31. [Echo Boomer].
So, like I was saying, I spent 10 years in the title industry helping real estate professionals grow their business. The 1st rule of sales and marketing [mine anyway] is to be where the eyeballs are, where the consumers are, where your ideal client is. If your ideal client is in the PTA, then you better get to filling out some paperwork to join it! But they are not. Your ideal client, [consumers] are on the Internet. They don’t start their homes search on a HUGE MASSIVE 3rd party real estate website like Trulia, REALTOR.com, Zillow or Yahoo real estate [although I am quite certain they would tell you differently], the majority ask a search engine like Google for information. If you want to grow your real estate business you need to be there. Period. End of story.
Now I know that you know someone, that knows someone, that went to school with someone that says “Internet leads stink”, let me tell you 1st hand that it is not true. How do I know? Because you are HERE right now, and I didn’t send you a postcards, flyer, text message, glossy magazine, or smile at you on a grocery cart when you were pricing the ham at your local grocery store. [There is a place for direct mail in your real estate business, any correspondence should offer a clear call to action with a website address that offers more VALUE] I simply optimized my website and my content and a few other things [I'm not tellin'] to get “FOUND” when you looked for information as [get this] consmers like yourself do. Yes, you are not only a consumer – YOU are also my ideal client! WELCOME 
Believe me now? Getting FOUND online by your ideal client is critical to your business, any business. If you are not getting “found” online, you are reduced to competing for the 4%-10% that obviously don’t have computers or an Internet connection?. The problem is – most real estate agent websites are absolutely horrible. When I say horrible I mean just that. They are template websites with little or NO SEO, no unique content, no engagement and to make matters worse, they are usually all about the agent – TOP PRODUCER 2003, #1 AGENT IN TOWN, ETC. Properly optimized websites [like mine] get found. I know some people are naturally confrontational and by nature like to disagree. I could sit here all day and throw statistics at you and point to your own behavior as evidence of what consumers do and don’t do but that would take forever and Starsky and Hutch is about to begin – what? Instead I will simply show you a little video we [PRO-Found] made where we asked totally random consumers in Arizona, specifically in Scottsdale, Tempe, Goodyear and Chandler the following questions:
If you were looking for a home, where would you go?
[if they said the Internet we asked “If you found a home you though fit your needs, what would you do then?”
“Do you receive direct mail?”
“Do you keep it, do you respond to it?”
The answers are quite telling. Those argumentative or in denial agents out there may say, “well that’s in Arizona, consumers in Alaska or Minnesota or Florida are different!” I promise you they are not. Enjoy! Oh, one more thing – if you are one of those agents that is motivated to make a change after watching the below video, you will need a website that works, that get’s found online. Low and behold, that’s what we do! What blind Luck! Come back to this link and visit PRO-Found Marketing, we can get you found online too. Enjoy and share with someone that insists on making the post office rich.
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