Real estate brokers and teams say consumers crave agents with specific neighborhood expertise, but they acknowledge they’re failing to deliver on it in their marketing and outreach, according to the
Hyperlocal Real Estate Survey, commissioned by the startup zavvie and conducted by the WAV Group.
Ninety-five percent of 350 real estate agents, teams, broker-owners, and real estate execs surveyed said that local market knowledge is “very important” or “extremely important” to their clients. However, only 12 percent of those in the industry say their marketing specializes in neighborhoods.
“Agents, teams and broker-owner, and execs are saying one thing and are doing another,” says Lane Hornung, CEO and co-founder of zavvie, a hyperlocal marketing platform. “The survey clearly shows their marketing activities are not consistent with hyperlocal being an actual priority. … In fact, the study found that most real estate professionals are doing the exact opposite of hyperlocal marketing: They are casting the largest net, trying to throw down their marketing circle as broad as possible.”
Hyperlocal agents and teams are described as those who focus their marketing activities on a neighborhood or group of neighborhoods, usually consisting of about 3,000 homes or 10,000 people.
More than 60 percent of individual agents and 65 percent of teams surveyed say they “specialize” in a large regional or metro area, according to the survey.
“It’s an oxymoron to specialize in a metro area,” says Stefan Peterson, COO of zavvie. “You can’t even specialize in a city or a town—it’s just too big of an area, geographically, to be a ‘go-to expert’ that knows every single home in that size of a market. Yet that’s what folks were claiming.”
Very few agents and brokerages reported using hyperlocal marketing tools, such as the Nextdoor website (17 percent), a blog (7 percent), or a neighborhood website (15 percent).
The majority of real estate pros said they were either “extremely knowledgeable” or “very knowledgeable” when it comes to local happenings, events, and changes that impact the housing market.
“The truth is, for busy agents, social media, and hyperlocal marketing tools and activities such as neighborhood websites and blogs are hard—they typically take a considerable amount of time and resources to create and maintain,” Peterson says. “But for those who invest the time and the effort, the deeper data we collected shows that hyperlocal marketing delivers significant results for those that employ it.”
Source: Zavvie.com/WAV Group Communications
