Radio Sales Café

Has anyone had success with a Real Estate Company utilizing your web site & radio? Many realtors are struggling right now and have reduced advertising. Has anyone had success in gettting some new dollars with an innovative idea?

Create a slide show on your webite. Be creative, tell stores, add pictures and voiced by your talent. Special tour or house of the week. maybe a win a prize for looking.. morning team road tour..on the web..


I'm working with a Realtor who's promoting mobile search. Re listings on your phone.
has been working great! The were working with a small budget in the newspaper and came to understand
it was a waste of time.

Good idea-I'm actually going to present this tomorrow. I'll let you know if we have success.

Very good ideas. I'll see if our interactive department is up to something like this. We actually did a video tour for an agent who had listed a half-million dollar home a couple of years ago, and he actually sold it from a person who saw it on our site. It was supported by a schedule, of course.

You might have them call in on a daily basis with the 'buy of the day' and do it live just like you might have a closing stock market report. The R.E. agent could also remind people of the $8000 tax credit for first time home buyers (anyone who hasn't owned a home in the past three years). Play to the ego of the prospect, and get the emotional sell as to the joy of home ownership. Remember "Facts tell. Emotions Sell".

Alan Rock
Orlando, FL

We used to run a "Property of the Week" feature in airtime. Make a donut ad (Top and Tail) then update with particular property details each week, Location, number of rooms, price and key selling points recorded in house. Worked really well at the time.

Mike,

Remembering that the Real Estate business is not exactly setting the world on fire these days, we have had some success with:

1. A series of ads that run on Saturdays and Sundays encouraging people who are out driving around looking for a house to stop doing that, save gas, call our client's office and let them help look for the house on their computers. In those ads we remind them that our client's agents can show and sell any home, regardless of who has it listed. You'd be surprised how many consumers don't know that and think they can only deal with the Realtor whose sign is in front of a property.

2. Lately, with the "up to $ 8,000 tax credit" and probably continuing if the extension is passed, we have been running a series of educational ads to help first-time homebuyers understand the process. These are voiced by one of our local Brokers, giving the series and the Broker some additional credibility.

3. And finally, we've been running a list of open houses each weekend with a number of Agents from different companies participating at a very low cost. As you know, this is a business where nothing happens until something is sold. That includes movement of dollars. Our deal per Agent is less than they would spend buying a newspaper ad. This hasn't been as successful as we hoped it would be, but some of these houses are being sold and we're getting credit for drawing attention to them, so I am hopeful that the word will get around and it will become a bigger deal with more participation.

Mike, I must have missed this when you first posted it in 2009.  I started working with a local Realtor named Chud Wendle in 2010, and his story is certainly a good (if belated) response to your post.

Chud had married a Pullman girl and had decided to moved here from Spokane, where he'd been running his family's highly successful automobile dealerships for many years. After cashing out of the family car business (and developing a popular strip mall where the main dealership had once stood), he and his young family moved to our community, where he launched into a new career as a Realtor. Without going into the back story in much more detail, I started following his Facebook and blog posts and eventually had a chance to meet with him over coffee.  I told him that I'd often wondered whether a person just starting out in real estate could shave many years off the time it would normally take to become well-known and established in a local market, through a smart, consistent radio advertising campaign.  I said that I had a particular idea in mind, but I didn't want to share it unless he agreed up front that, if he liked the idea, he would either run it on my stations, or else not use it in any form whatsoever.  He agreed.  So, I suggested that we brand him as "Pullman's Real Estate Expert" and have him voice an ongoing series of Real Estate tips. He was a great fit for this campaign, audacious as it sounded to have the new guy position himself this way.  I cautioned him that if he started doing this, two things would happen:  1) he would incur the wrath of most of the real estate agents in town (which happened); and 2) every media salesperson in the market would be after him for a piece of this (which also happened).  But I'd advised him that he didn't have enough money to do justice to this campaign on more than two stations and obtained his agreement that he would not sacrifice frequency for reach.

After 3-4 months, he began to see the fruit of this effort and continued to leap-frog over 95% of the other agents in the market, both in terms of prominence and, more importantly, the business he was writing.  Anecdotes and success stories abound, including one rather embarrassing situation where a lady who'd been working with another agent in the same office came in and rather loudly announced that she wanted to start working with Chud instead.  Many of the people who contacted him for representation in a real estate transaction cited his radio advertising as the reason they'd sought him out.

The spots ran every day, every week, all year long. We changed ad copy every 2-4 weeks. Chud was not afraid to tackle touchy subjects, including FSBO's.  At my suggestion, he created a special area on his website devoted to helping people who wanted to sell their own homes.  The logic, of course, was that most people who start out trying to sell their homes eventually bag it and go with a Realtor.  We wanted that Realtor to be Chud.

His campaign ran successfully for 3 years or so, until he decided to move with his family back to Spokane to pursue a new dream.  

I'll upload a couple samples from the campaign below.  It's one of the most fun (and professionally satisfying) campaigns I've ever put together for an advertiser, and I was sorry to see it end.  

Interestingly, one of the very few Realtors who openly praised Chud for his RE101 campaign happens to be another client of mine, who's new branding campaign is described here.

As far as radio advertising goes, the best tip on advertising real estate came from a broker who bought from me.

Her secret was to take that listing with the most perks people look for in a home and advertise that home exclusively.  A perk could be almost anything from a list of 'hot' features people like.  

Once we were on the air, during one visit, a couple came in to find out about the property with the big fenced backyard and in ground pool.  The broker said they heard the ad.  She said it always happens this way.  People come in asking for the listing that had a certain thing important to them.  She said she always had several homes with each 'perk' in various price ranges...the trick was getting them there so they could show some homes.

And, by the way, she was the top selling agency in the county.

My client, Chris Clark, has in recent months been airing a spot in which he details the things he does for people who list their homes with him...money he spends out of his own pocket to expedite a favorable result. In other words, here's what HE does to earn his commission. 

The current spot followed on the heels of an earlier message that demonstrated "by the numbers" his success in selling homes, and his singular focus in working for home SELLERS, rather than presenting himself as a guy who does it all.  By excluding a pitch to buyers, he really frames himself as the expert of choice for people wanting to sell their home.  You can listen to both spots below.  I'd love to hear what you think of the approach.