Are Los Altos Real Estate Agents Still Using Old School Marketing Techniques?
Promotional flyers have been used by agents in marketing homes in Los Altos and the surrounding cities for many years. With technology getting better and more sophisticated, one would think that the number of agents who use promotional flyers targeted at real estate agents as part of their marketing efforts would be zero (or close to that).
Promotional flyers are just that, 8 1/2 by 11 inch flyers that describe a property and it’s amenities. They are targeted towards the real estate agent and are similar to the flyer that is handed out at open houses.
About 15 years ago, when the MLS consisted of a 1/2 inch thick book of homes for sale, I used to use a company to distribute promotional flyers about my listings to local real estate professionals. This company would hand deliver my flyers to all the local real estate offices and they would be put in the individual agent’s mail box. The cost was relatively cheap (about $15.00 for 450 flyers) and, at the time, a relatively good method of keeping agents informed about my listings.
Today, this method of property promotion is about as effective as the using the Pony Express to deliver documents. It’s extremely out-dated. It is a huge waste of money, time and more importantly, resources. Most active real estate agents have a network of e-mail contacts and/or personal contacts within the real estate community that makes paying for the distribution of information via a paper flyer useless. (picture courtesy of http://www.jankyvision.com/2008/01/this-day-in-history-pony-express-when.html)
Most agents who receive these flyers, either recycle them or throw them away without ever reading them. They are the real estate equivalent of junk mail solicitations that we all receive at home. No one wants them, they aren’t read and they’re thrown away very quickly.
In addition to not being an effective means of property promotion, they waste a lot of paper and other resources. The minimum order quantity currently is about 400 flyers and the cost is about $35.00 per area. If 10 agents mailed weekly (just to the Los Altos, Palo Alto and Menlo Park area), that’s over 16,000 sheets of paper ending up in the trash/recycle bin per month. Multiply that by the 26 delivery areas and that’s a lot of dead trees.
If your real estate agent boasts about his or her marketing plan that involves the use of distributing real estate flyers to each agent, I would question whether the rest of the marketing plan was current and targeted for today’s buyers and their agents.
