Inman’s “State of Real Estate Marketing 2007″ Report

I was able to get an advanced copy of Inman’s State of Real Estate Marketing 2007 report, which just became available on their website. It’s 50 page document on real estate marketing, based on a survey of 770 real estate professionals via their website. This means that it has a bent towards technology-focused real estate pros, but the findings are interesting none-the-less.

On Newbies vs Old Hands

Respondents who had fewer than five years’ experience in real estate were most likely to say they planned to spend more on marketing in the next year. A full 58% of these relative newbies planned to increase their marketing spend while an additional 25% planned to spend the same amount. At the other end of the spectrum, respondents who had more than 15 years’ experience in real estate were slightly less likely to say they planned to increase or hold steady on marketing expenditures. That may be because these veterans rely on low-cost referrals for new business or because they’d already increased their annual advertising budgets earlier in their careers.

On Print vs Online Advertising
I found it interesting that they had no real solid finding on what way marketers were planning to go on print vs online advertising. Having just covered the fact that Realogy and HomeServices are both downsizing their print spend, it seems that the trend should be moving towards online and away from print.

On Blogging
As mentioned earlier, the people who took this questionnaire likely have a tendency towards being first-movers in new technology for real estate. When we look at the numbers of bloggers, this becomes pretty clear, as there is no way that they match up to what the true numbers are for real estate bloggers in the country:

On Social Networking
30.9% of the agents are getting involved with social networking websites – that’s a fairly large percentage too. Of course, that means there are over 60% who are not, but at this point in the cycle of new online media those are pretty solid numbers. When asked which sites they use, it was no surprise that Active Rain came out on top.

What I would like to see is a break down of which sites they go to for industry purposes compared to the ones they are a part of to actually market themselves and sell property.