The real estate (or property) sector, in the recent past, has definitely moved towards a much more digitalized approach. There are several things to keep in mind and considering the fact that technology moves extremely fast in today's business world, it's mandatory to periodically audit its development. With this in mind, let's analyse why certain technology-related features will heavily and massively impact the world of real estate and, most importantly, its business sector.
The Usage Of Data To Speed Up
A Slow Workspace
As you know, in the recent past, there has been a big usage of data in a number of business sectors. Data is the centre of many marketing operations within FANG (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google) level companies and it turned out to be the fastest way to approach marketing with an insane ROI (some campaigns, when associated to other platforms like AWS, have peaked at over 98% ROI) and a relatively quick setup once the actual architecture is set up.
The usage of data within the real estate sector, though, is pretty much related to the fact that a lot of different tasks within this very business world are slow and require (most of the times) legal checks. If you're looking to buy a house or simply get a mortgage, the company who's providing it will be able to use data to manage the risk when confirming it or rejecting. With all this in mind, it will be easy for you to understand why and how the usage of data could impact your property listings.
Digital Marketing Moving
Things Quickly
If there's one thing which changed this sector, that would definitely be its "digitalization". We've seen data above and digital marketing is no exception. The usage of data for digital marketing purposes, in fact, has contaminated a number of services, ranging from SEO to PPC and going through paid social ads in particular.
Overall, though, digital marketing strategies like the ones mentioned above are still relevant nowadays and they can, in fact, be stretched to the point in which they can easily be condensed with far more "technical" ones, just like the data-driven one mentioned above. With this being said, it's easy to understand why many commercial property agents decided to move towards this very approach, instead of relying on a more "traditional" and direct one. Digital marketing with data is definitely going to set the foundation in regards to the evolution of the entire property sector.
SEO: Optimising Content For
Marketing Results
Optimising your website's content for marketing purposes is literally the 101 of every single marketing-related operation. That's why keyword research and content work so well together within this sector: property and real estate are, overall, very keyword-driven, with a lot of definitions, complex shenanigans and legal routes to keep in mind.
Take it from there and it's a matter of connecting two dots to understand why optimising your content for Google rankings will become the most important thing for your digital marketing strategy. SEO still heavily relies on content, even if there has been a significant code-related input coming from Google itself with a lot of room being opened to technical SEO as a whole. Optimising your content for SEO results, if you are a real estate agency, is almost vital.
Boosting Big Keywords with PPC
Pay per click (PPC) when it comes to big keywords has been the go-to choice of many different brands, not exclusively property agents and agencies. It's super important, though, to acknowledge the fact that the real estate sector as a whole has almost abused of certain keywords, effectively making them ultra-expensive for small brokers and small agencies who don't have a big PPC budget.
With this in mind, my personal advice would be to target keywords which aren't necessarily already targeted with SEO-related strategies, just so your budget will be used in the most optimal way. It's mandatory to keep in mind that PPC isn't something that you are obliged to do, but it's something which can definitely be used to maintain not-so-well-performing keywords within the short timeframe. PPC is still, regardless, something which you ideally want to do.
The Future Of Digitalization
Within Property
We've walked through how slim and fast operations and marketing will become within the property sector in the next couple of years and we can also safely say that this will escalate even more at some point, given how many startups are building and connecting data point and data/tech-related features to property (and similar) environments.
With this also comes digitalisation in other areas, such as property purchases and house viewings. Over the pandemic, more and more buyers were reliant upon digital aspects of purchasing a property and, unfortunately, this brought with it the issue of broker scams and false listings.