Real Estate Mobile Marketing Statistics and Trends 2013

With mobile marketing reaching new heights with the introduction of the smartphone, smart tablets, cellular data networks, and increased cell phone battery life, mobile marketing for real estate has become a growing trend within the real estate industry. Not only is the industry recognizing the need for mobile marketing, but customers and potential customers are learning how to use today’s new technology to search for and find anything real estate related.

Mobile marketing has gotten to the point where it is considered one of the major differentiating factors when it comes to the success of a business. This is also true with real estate marketers. Companies and businesses who are still choosing not to implement a mobile marketing strategy into their overall marketing strategy are quickly falling behind their competitors. The ironic thing is that these companies aren’t using mobile marketing mostly because they either don’t see the value of the technology or they do not know how to use it.

According to the report at the bottom of this article (which you can open up and view by clicking on it), searches related to real estate on Google are up a whopping 253% in the last 4 years and up 22% in 2012’s third quarter alone. Additionally, mobile searches for real estate terms have increased 120% while searches using tablets to find real estate terms have exploded over 300%.

A majority of marketers and real estate investors are hopefully aware of the fact that 90% of all home buyers are now using the internet for their searches. Over half of that 90% is using it as their first step. Another thing a lot of people probably do not know is that people who buy foreclosures are much more likely to use the internet than others, and they alone were responsible for an increase of 180% in related searches via mobile as opposed to the 7% that used desktops.

If you ask most real estate investors, the reasons they give for not having a mobile marketing strategy right now is because they need money and deals right now and they simply do not have the time for it. These same real estate investors probably do not know that 24% of people using the internet for their home search ended up taking physical action the same day. Not enough? 60% of those same people took action within 60 days and 7 out of even 10 who took action used local keywords to search. If you’re a marketer, note that the most popular states for searches related to forclosures are Florida, Nevada, Georgia, Arizona, and Illinois.

A big marketing tool on mobile devices is video. Unfortunately, not a lot of real estate marketers fully understand how to use it efficiently. A majority of marketers think that video is used by customers and potential customers for home tours and to watch testimonials, when in actuality people use video more often to find out more about a particular community.

Lastly, but certainly not least, the marketers who will have the most success are the ones who have the most content and data. The more content and data you have the better you can market your products and services to the house seeking public. Remember this, this is important.

Unfortunately, despite all the information and statistics pointing towards a rise in mobile marketing for real estate, most real estate marketers are still not taking advantage of its endless capabilities. Think about this, it will only take two or three real estate mobile apps to lock a majority of buyers out of the market. If someone else has an app, but you don’t, why would anyone want to come to you instead of someone they can work with through their mobile devices while on the go? The same goes for entire marketing strategies. The real estate marketers who implement mobile marketing into their marketing strategies will survive, the ones who don’t? You won’t hear about them in 5 years.