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Study: Say ta-ta to real estate classifieds
By Samantha Melamed
Sep 6, 2006, 22:00

Even as the buzz around classifieds web sites like Craigslist and Google Base grows, newspapers continue to report growth in their print real estate classified advertising.

But not for much longer. As a new report from Classified Intelligence puts it, rather bluntly, "That train is about to run out of track."

The research outfit, which tracks trends in classified advertising, conducted a survey of real estate experts and more than 100 agents. It found that 51 percent have already switched some of their advertising to free classifieds sites and that many plan to cut their print newspaper spending out altogether.

No less startling, the majority of those real estate advertisers who are shifting their ad dollars online are not spending them on newspaper web sites. Those dollars are going to independent sites dedicated to snatching home buyers and sellers.

CI found that 72 percent of realtors planned to spend 20 percent or less of their 2006 ad budgets on local newspapers print editions, while 94 percent will spend 20 percent or less on those papers' web sites.

"Realtors are going to move their advertising online steadily," says CI founding principal Peter Zollman, "and they're going to continue to move fairly aggressively away from daily newspapers."

According to the Newspaper Association of America, real estate advertising was up 9.9 percent from 2004 to 2005, and up again in first quarter 2006. 
 
Zollman says realtors are leaving print and heading to free classifieds sites because of the cost factor. But they're doing so because they feel print is not effective and that it's difficult to track return on investment.

By contrast, online advertising offers detailed measurement.

"All of these sites have measurement tools that you can use to determine how many people saw your ad, how they responded, what they looked at and what the search parameters were," he says. "That's one of the things that's driving online advertising. You can tell specifically what is working."



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