Are ILS’ a Property Marketer’s Friend or “Frien-emy”?

In the Real Estate marketing ecosystem, Internet Listing Search (ILS) sites have become a valuable tool for listing properties for sale or rent and for generating leads to view them. That’s because in today’s day and age, online consumers have free access to once closely held information by brokers and various decision-making tools like monthly cost analysis, mortgage calculators, school ratings, and even noise levels near a property.

ILS’ build helpful tools consumers love to play around with, making it easier to imagine and decide on moving to a new home. Agents and brokers do not control the information flow as much as they once did before the digital age and consumers have not been worse for wear from an activity standpoint as seen by the housing boom(s) of the past 15+ years. The free flow of info via ILS, faster productivity via email and transaction software, and the digitization of documents (mortgage and legal) and listings, and the housing bubble has aided in quicker home price discovery, speed up transaction times, and inevitably forced a compression of commissions and margins on brokerages. 

If you are on the brokerage side, it is impossible to ignore the sheer scale of audiences ILS’ deliver. The days of pocket listings held by brokerages are abruptly ending and office “exclusives” are coming under heavy scrutiny as anti-consumer as well. The playing field for consumers has been leveled and a lot of agents feel the local MLS is no longer as vital as it once was. 

It is now clear, if you are a broker and do not list property on Zillow, StreetEasy, or other free ILS’, you are likely doing a disservice to your sellers or landlords because most home shoppers eventually make their way to these properties to search.  

But the Real Estate industry isn’t just about resale of homes. There is also a huge portion of the housing economy related to direct marketing of new homes via Home Builders or apartment communities by Multifamily companies. So, let’s talk about ILS’ and their place in that vertical… 

Generally, the consumer experience is very good for Home Builders and Multifamily companies but with large scale costs of construction, loan payments, and seasonal sales cycles, any product or search site that isn’t performing well has to be looked at from an ROI perspective every quarter. 

At Audience Town, we hear a lot of complaints about decreasing ROI of marketing properties on various ILS’ from in-house marketing teams. Costs are rising, consolidation of ILS’ is altering these offerings, and some service models are becoming more of a calculated risk than a helpful tool. 

The dominant apartment search sites have been Apartment List, Apartment Guide, Rent.com, and Apartments.com. The players have been RentPath, CoStar, Yardi, BDX and RealPage. Recently, Zillow has fully immersed itself as a major player in Multifamily apartment search listings as well. CoStar’s recent purchase of RentPath consolidates the players in the industry even more, resulting in potential cost increases for apartment marketers. 

“RentPath was burdened with a heavy debt load that prevented the company from making the necessary investments in building brand recognition and generating traffic from Google,” said Andrew Florance, CoStar’s CEO. “As the cost of Google traffic soared, RentPath was unable to keep pace.” 

Interestingly, in Multifamily, some ILS’ will charge marketing teams per lead and others charge per closed lease. It can be difficult for property marketers to decide which will have the best ROI and sometimes the business models change without notice. Depending on geo, cost of leads or leases can vary dramatically so it can be tough to market a property portfolio in multiple geos and keep track of what is working or what is too expensive. 

That’s when we at Audience Town usually get a phone call. We run a complex data targeting advertising platform to find and reach consumers likely to move in the next 3-6 months, but we keep it simple. Instead of showing them your home or apartment that’s available for sale or rent on a search site, we place cross-device mobile ads and videos or even virtual tour ads of your property in front of them while they are consuming media, video or connected TV outside of that search. 

Our products drive prospects directly to your website before, during, or after they are actively searching for a new home on ILS’ which really boosts your ROI in a measurable, repeatable way. 

Find out more by contacting Audience Town today!