How real estate agents are beating the big real estate marketing portals with AI

Australia’s REA group sure has its haters!? The publicly listed company that enjoys market dominance with realestate.com.au in Australia and realestate.co.nz in New Zealand is charging up to $3000 for one listing on their site.? The second-place real estate portal in Australia, domain.com.au is not far behind.

Naturally, agents feel helplessly trapped as they know there’s no alternative to finding buyers for their listings. Agents tell me there is no way they could possibly compete with the SEO spend a company like REA group has to capture online buyer traffic.

But I beg to differ.

We don’t have an MLS platform in Australia or NZ where any agent can introduce a buyer to any listing and receive a share of the fee but we do have something else:? It’s called Vendor Paid Advertising or VPA.

For many years, property sellers in Australia and NZ have seen the value of great marketing and are happy to pay for it in addition to commission. With no MLS the going commission rate is around 2 to 3% so there’s some room for a prudent seller to make a marketing investment to achieve top dollar. It naturally varies in different markets but the rule-of-thumb for VPA in the big cities is around 1% of the likely property value.

I believe the rise and rise of social media presents real estate agents with a brilliant opportunity to spend some of those VPA dollars on paid ads and reap some pretty spectacular rewards.

In the last year, working with our real estate clients, we’ve proven that a great ad on Facebook, Instagram or LinkedIn can actually win more clicks than the listing on realestate.com.au

Our clients are seeing more clicks than the big portals, a click-through rate of 15-20%, (benchmark is 1.75%) and cost-per-click as low as 3 cents! (benchmark is $1.80)

But here’s the kicker …those click-throughs drive traffic to the listing page featured on the agent’s website, not to one of the big portals.

When you send a buyer to your own website there’s a huge opportunity for engagement and starting relationships than if the buyer had clicked on the main portal link.

And to state the obvious, this marketing is funded by the selling client, not the agent.

Then, let’s talk about the agent’s market exposure on social media with their listings and brand constantly in front of potential selling clients in their area. Agents know their market is online, they now have a way to consistently connect and get their brand in front of more eyeballs.

When you add AI into the mix, you can run multiple ads on one daily budget amount, and in a week or ten days, AI will determine which combination of headline, copy, and image is getting the traffic and start to shift the daily spend budget towards the best-performing ad.

I’m thrilled to see agents fighting back and scoring some nice punches against the giants. The advances in AI helping us create better ads is also helping agents regain brand exposure that has been slowly evaporating for many years. ?

Bring it on! I’m excited about the future of real estate marketing and for the agents who make the move to capitalize on this brand-new opportunity.

Take a look at the numbers below. These are client account screenshots that show the power of marketing real estate listings with AI??