Complete Guide – Real Estate Marketing to the Modern Buyer
Real estate marketing can sometimes seem like a dark art. Type ‘property marketing’ into Google and you’ll find a strange spread of results. Random articles from Hubspot. Job listings from Indeed. It felt like there was a gaping hole for a complete guide on property marketing.
We’ve been working with leading UK housebuilders for well over a decade, so we’ve learnt a thing or two about what sells a property. At EyeSiteView, we’ve been pushing the category into the digital age and have delivered over 10,000 Virtual Showhomes.
A 2020 study by the National Association of Realtors (NAR) found that 88% of buyers recently purchased their home through a real estate agent or broker. But that same study found that 73% of buyers interviewed only one real estate agent during their home search.
This indicates times are changing. The modern buyer won’t be making repeat visits to your physical showhome, on the off chance one might take their fancy. The modern buyer is meticulous in their research and expects everything to be digital-first.
This complete guide will equip any property marketer with the tools and know-how on reaching the modern buyer. Let’s get started.
We speak to housebuilders all the time, we know what keeps them awake at night. A few of them have the impression that virtual tours are complicated to instruct, or tricky to build into their existing marketing & sales strategy.
Let’s bust that myth.
The 360° Virtual Tour & Virtual Showhome have become staple tools for any modern housebuilder looking to sell property off plan. If a buyer is looking for a new-build, chances are they’ll be exploring a CGI Virtual Showhome rather than a physical one. These tools have become the industry standard, which means if you aren’t using them, you’re missing out.
One of the biggest concerns we hear from housebuilders is they’re worried about how quick and easy Virtual Showhomes are to get up & running. The truth is, they couldn’t be easier. Our Virtual Tour & Showhome tools have been designed with convenience in mind.
Let’s walk through it step-by-step. One of the biggest concerns we hear from housebuilders is they’re worried about how quick and easy Virtual Showhomes are to get up & running. The truth is, they couldn’t be easier. Our Virtual Tour & Showhome tools have been designed with convenience in mind.
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Contents
> Create a website or Customer Portal
> Build a blog to attract home buyers
> Develop email marketing campaigns
> Virtual Tours & Virtual Showhome
> Build a virtual element to the sales centre
> Try experiential marketing
> Partner with Local Businesses
> Use drone photography
> Co-host a webinar
> Collect and display testimonials
> Invest in branded merchandise
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1- Create a website or Customer Portal
It sounds obvious but some housebuilders are still operating with offline marketing, even with 2022. As the data suggests, 73% of buyers only speak to a real estate agent once when purchasing a property – which means most of their interaction comes through an online experience.
There’s one thing creating a website that works and another thing creating a website that converts, we want to be operating in the latter. UX specialist Joe Speiser has a quick playbook that anyone should follow when building a website. It can be executed in five simple steps.
Alternatively, you can take things a step further and build a customer portal. With a portal, your clients can access their listings, enquiries and have a personalised dash all at their fingertips. This keeps the customer within your ecosystem and creates a seamless experience between viewing online and progressing to placing a deposit. It keeps the competitors at bay.
2- Build a blog to attract home buyers
An essential tool for thought leadership in the housebuilding sector, and to bring buyers directly to your website. A blog is a great place to carve out a positioning amongst a competitive sector. Educate, inspire and delight readers on everything they need to know about the house-buying sector. Unpack features and benefits of the listings and plot features. Build content around trends and relevant keywords and draw in relevant Google search traffic.
We’ve noticed that buyers are drawn to helpful content that makes the whole experience of buying less stressful. These are some great examples of helpful content that pull in relevant readers:
>How to Buy a House (Which)
>Buying a House: A Detailed Guide (Bankrate)
>Buying a new-build home? Here’s everything you need to know (Zoopla)
3 – Develop email marketing campaigns
Buying a house takes a while. Moneysupermarket.com estimates it takes up to a year, from the first concrete search. It’s a huge deal for buyers, it’s a massive financial and emotional investment. We even wrote a whole piece on the 7 emotions of buying a property.
Because of this, patience towards marketing is needed. The long game must be played. Email is a fantastic marketing tool to nurture prospects and turn them into customers. Building a marketing list is an artform but with hundreds or even thousands of listings, housebuilders manage to build up a rich database over time.
The prospects within these databases need to be nudged and nurtured over time. In some cases, it can take years before a prospect is in the financial position to purchase a house. Email ensures housebuilders stay front of mind. Considering repurposing helpful blog content or sharing updates on the latest listing availability. Be careful not to overdo the sales messaging, sometimes offering value to a customer is a more valuable investment.
4 – Roll out Virtual Showhomes & Virtual Tours
The modern buyer needs everything at their fingertips. There will always be a place for the physical showhome, its an important part of the buying process that gives buyers hands on experience with a replica home. But more and more, buyers are experiencing virtual showhomes and virtual tours to explore their dream home.
Virtual tours enable housebuilders to get new build property to market much quicker. Digital twins of every listing are readily available as soon as planning is secured. Through the power of 3D house tours and Virtual Showhomes, EyeSiteView are enabling house builders to sell property off-plan quicker. A virtual tour visualises every detail & dimension of housing plots, providing access for the modern buyer to view from the comfort of their sofa.
At EyeSiteView we’ve delivered over 10,000 Virtual Showhomes, enabling the UK’s leading house-builders to take listings to market before a brick has been laid. The assets used within the virtual tour and showhome can also be used on the housebuilder website and within the company portal.
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Read more
>Sell Property Quicker with 3D House Tours & the Virtual ShowHome
>Buildling a Virtual Showhome – from Start to Finish
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5 – Build a virtual element to the sales centre
The blend of virtual and physical is where the leading housebuilders are operating. Creating a seamless link between virtual tours online and the physical sales centre, ensures the buyer stays fully engaged through the purchase journey.
Tools like EyeSiteViews ViewStation & Vantage are bridging the gap between the virtual and the physical. The leading house-builders in the UK such as Redrow and Story Homes have moved their sales centres into the customer experience space. Gone are the days of old-school sales centres, it’s about picking up from where the buyer left off in their online research. Sales centres create a seamless transition between the buyer’s virtual reality experience and the physical marketing suite.
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Read more
>Vantage brings Virtual Reality to the Sales Centre
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6 – Try experiential marketing
Related to the sales centre, open home or showhome events are a great way of drawing community attention to a new build development. This could be a great chance to show off the interactive tech in your Sales Centre, such as ViewStation or Vantage. This will reassure the modern buyer they can return to their online research and pickup virtual tours from where they left off.
If this feels like an effective tactic for housebuilders, there are plenty of UK based experiential marketing agencies who could assist with strategy and planning.
7 – Partner with local businesses
EyeSiteView is based in Chichester and being part of the local community is important for our business and value sets. We’ve partnered frequently with Chichester County Council to celebrate local events and local infrastructure. For housebuilders, there are plenty of local businesses who have services that compliment the property offering. It’s all about establishing a win-win relationship.
We’ve seen these work well for leading UK housebuilders:
-Partnering with local and independent interior designers for showhomes
-Partnering with local car dealerships
-Partnering with local gardening and landscape designers
Ultimately, plenty of buyers move within the area they already live, so building connections and relationships with the community and local business will only further awareness of the housebuilders listings. It also lands well if housebuilders are seen to be integrating with the local area! We believe that partnerships are, and have been, a fundamental player in some of our best projects to date – Charterted Institute of Housing.
8 – Use drone photography
It’s no longer enough for housebuilders to rely on a plush showhome to sell listings on a development. Leading housebuilders are selling property off plan before a brick has even been laid. But even with the physical builds, housebuilders will still require versatile assets that are eye catching and repurpose well for social media.
Drone photography, when done well with a quality resolution value, looks premium and instantly skyrockets your listing into a more compelling online format than a static visual.
9 – Create video fly-throughs and animations
According to HubSpot Blogs research, 66% of consumers have watched video content (i.e., product demos, reviews, FAQs, unboxings, etc.) to learn about a brand or product. This shows the way modern buyers are interacting with educational content is changing. They expect content to be built video-first.
Videos give consumers the opportunity to see how a product or service works in real life, discover any flaws before purchasing the item, and identify perks that they might not learn about in the text-based descriptions – HubSpot Blogs
Video walkthroughs are an exceptional way to ensure a listing promotion is video first. Walkthroughs are essentially sizzle-reels of a listing, showcasing the best bits and giving the buyer a fuller picture of the physical space.
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Read more
>Digitise Your Property Marketing with Animation & Video
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10 – Co-host a webinar
With the video-led appetite the industry and the modern buyer has, it’s no surprise real estate experts have been producing more and more webinar content. With the economic climate so challenging, there’s a beady eye from buyers on marketing strength and the overall landscape of the property industry.
Experts like Matt Fleming, who’s an expert on an audience he’s coined the ‘digital visitor’ – an elaborate way of referring to the modern buyer. Mr Fleming frequently shares deep-dive webinars on the state of the property sector. So much so, we featured one of his videos in our article on how housebuilders can turn the digital visitor into real-estate customers.
Whilst not all housebuilders will have the expertise or resources to run a full webinar, partnering with a content creator such as Matt would drive awareness amongst industry heads but also savvy buyers who are looking for the inside scoop.
11 – Collect and display testimonials.
In marketing, building trust with the customer is paramount. Nothing builds trust better than a customer success story. Extracting them requires hoping on a quick call with a happy buyer and understanding why the buying process was successful at every twist and turn.
The case study itself should be results focused but also draw on the emotional journey of the whole buying process. This makes the content extremely relatable.
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Read our case studies for inspiration
>EyeSiteView Case Study library
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12 – Leverage traditional advertising media.
Reserved for those housebuilders who have bigger budgets but want to take things to a nation-wide scale. Traditional advertising media is still the best way to generate mass audience reach. There are plenty of creative & media agencies out there who have access to media inventory such as print, OOH, DOOH and even TV.
A strong agency will carve out an effective creative strategy that’s founded on strategic insight and market research. This will ensure any advertising activity has consistency but also speaks to the right person at the right time, with the right message. Certain media placements can also enable housebuilders to ‘dominate’ local media buys. Some media agencies have access to expansive inventories of bus shelter and street-side DOOH in and around town centres. A great way to raise awareness with local buyers.
13 – Invest in branded merchandise
The theme throughout this guide is that despite us being purveyors of everything CGI, we’re big believers in the blend of the physical and the virtual. Vantage & ViewStation for the sales centre. Virtual Showhomes standing tall against physical ones. Brand merchandise might seem old-school but when delivered intelligently, it’s still an unrivalled way to stay front of mind. We’ve mentioned before that the buying process is a long one, so a keychain looped into your prospects car keys for a year is never a bad thing.
Consider smart integrations like using QR codes on merch to create a digital and scannable element that brings prospects offline and into the business ecosystem.
Build a virtual marketing toolkit with EyeSiteView
We’ll always champion the blend of physical and virtual marketing. Buyers will always need a physical experience with a property before putting pen to paper. But this complete marketing guide shows that the modern buyer expects a thoroughly digital first approach, with only a small percentage of the process happening with real-life real estators.
At EyeSiteView, we’ll assess the size of the development, carve out a strategic roadmap and recommend a suite of virtual marketing tools that address the development’s bespoke needs. There’s no one-size-fits all approach. We’ve delivered over 10,000 virtual showhomes and worked with leading UK housebuilders on 250+ developments.
Find out why and arrange a demo with the team today.
