Revisiting the Need for a Real Estate Ad Network

I just read the Bloomberg report on how Realogy is planning on shifting the majority of their marketing budget from offline to online. At this level, we’re talking tens of millions of dollars being put into different media vehicles and platforms. With newspapers dying, the online advertising funnels for real estate are starting to get bigger.

Smith, president of Realogy Corp., the largest residential real estate broker in the U.S., said the portion of his Coldwell Banker and Century 21 branding budget devoted to newspapers will shrink by as much as two-thirds next year from 2006 as spending moves online. Newspapers will receive 70 percent of Realogy’s home-sale advertising by 2010, down from 84 percent this year.

A change is coming, who is ready?
I opined a couple months ago about the need for a real estate ad network that would allow marketers to easily place their ads on both real estate specific sites (such as Homegain, Move.com, eppraisal.com, Trulia, etc…) and on the ever growing social scene found via social networks an blogs.

For companies like Realogy and HomeServices to take it seriously, the network needs to be both simple and far-reaching. It needs to harness the types of media that are working today – think video and interactivity, not banner ads. Above all, it needs to be flexible and work for everyone from bloggers to big business.

However, in order to be successful it will need to make the marketer’s job easier. At the end of the day, it is the stressed out/strung out media buyer that will make a lot of the decisions. Put yourself in their shoes. You have $20 million worth of ads to place this quarter, where do you start?

This is a huge opportunity.