I’ve never been a big proponent of property specific domains for selling a piece of property. In most markets it doesn’t seem to make sense. However, after thinking about it for a while I came up with a few reasons why I think selling a piece of real estate using a property-specific URL would make sense and help sell it.

• You know your property will be on the market for a long time
• The property is exquisite and needs to be showcased properly – not in some pre-formatted real estate brokerage site
• The domain is part of the sale – the new owner gets the domain as well as the house

It’s Going to be on the Market for a Long Time
You’ll likely list the property in all of the traditional ways, but since you know the property will not be sold soon it’s worth the investment of creating a special site for it. You probably want to make sure that your property isn’t buried and lost in a sea of other listings over time as well, which makes perfect sense for large or expensive property types.

I came across a great example of this recently “230+ Acres of Prime Connecticut Real Estate” has it’s own website. The designer of the website mentioned the reasoning behind his client coming to him:

The site owner figures the property being sold — 230+ Acres in Connecticut — will be on the market for a while. At only $1.5 million, though, I suspect it’ll sell in a flash. It’s a very nice piece of prime real estate. In any case the owner wanted the site to be highly indexed so hopefully it will be. The tools are in place.

Showcase High-end Properties Better
If you’re selling a piece of property for a lot of money, a case can be made that spending some money on a really well designed website can make you stand out, be noticed and shared more easily.

The Villa Pelican beachfront property in Montecito, California is amazing. With 8 bedrooms and 11 bathrooms, great grounds and neighbors and a view to die for, it’s worth making sure people can really see and enjoy it. Here it is listed at LuxuryRealEstate.com, and here is a link the Villa Pelican specific website created for the property. See the difference? For a house selling for $34,000,000 it probably makes sense to have a good looking site for it specifically.

The Domain (if it’s a good one) Becomes Part of the Value
Realtors can start thinking of including the domain as part of the package. If it’s a well done website that showcases the property well, then it’s an asset. When the new owners want to show people what they just bought, or when they decide to sell it themselves, they now have a way to do that more easily.

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.

Why isn’t there an independent advertising network, made specifically for real estate, that targets bloggers, social sites and even the more established sites online?

The Problem
Let me lay it out from the advertisers point of view. You have a service, property or product that you want to advertise and get the word out on. You’d love to advertise on sites that are relevant to your demographic or geographic region.

It would be nice if you could get a package to advertise on sites like Trulia, Hotpads, Homegain, Zillow, and eppraisal.com, etc… In fact, you’d like to advertise on blogs of people within a specific area too, so being able to tap into independent real estate bloggers and geographically target the Active Rain network would also be nice.

Well, you can. The only thing you have to do is contact each one of these parties and work out a deal, cut 15 different checks and create advertising creative in 15 different sizes and formats. Hmmm, it’s not so easy to manage, and it’s no wonder that advertisers balk at the idea. It’s just not efficient.

The Solution
Let’s say an independent (meaning not part of any existing technology solution or company) party creates an ad network targeted at real estate. It’s a tool designed to harness what is possible with technology online, use the power of segmentation by demographics and geographic targeting to provide real value.

Why it works:

• Advertisers can finally reach the long-tail of real estate online
• The network’s size allows it to specialize and give proper attention to publishers and advertisers
• Publishers (blogs, web sites and social networks) can be pre-vetted for quality
• It’s a simple to use tool that makes it a one-stop-shop for buying ad space
• The payout can be larger than what other “meta-networks” (think Google) can provide

Challenges
In a competitive space like real estate, publishers tend to think that they can handle their own advertising platform just fine. That, and no one likes giving up control. What happens is marketing dollars only go towards the “big players” and each dollar spent is not as effective as it could be. The large sites will continue to protect their own monopoly on ad dollars, but it’s not in the best interest of marketers to let this happen.

Some will say, “why don’t you just use Google, it’s an ad platform designed to reach the long tail?” Simply put, the big meta-networks can’t give either the advertiser or the publisher the attention that they need. Secondarily, the payout for the publisher is not near what it should be for the space that they’re providing.

What about trust? Why should bloggers and big publishers place their trust in an outside entity to manage their revenue stream or their marketing budget? Besides creating a simple and powerful tool, the second hardest part would be building trust. However, if it works, that’s all the proof that both publishers and advertisers need to make it a viable platform. So, testing, adding value and relationship building are the only ways to counter this argument.

Summary
In the end, it’s a tool for advertisers that makes their lives easier. When you provide a tool that allows people who spend money for a living to do it easier and see a greater return, you’re bound to create a winning situation for both parties.

(Why not something as simple as what Federated Media does, except for the real estate vertical?)