Your dream home could be only a tweet away

 

By  KEVIN OGUOKO

Taking over from Craiglist in the online classified international market, OLX has become one of the most popular online platforms to sell goods and services.

Provided in more than 45 languages, OLX enables users to design advertisements with pictures and videos, control their selling, buying, and community activity.

The real estate market has not been left behind. It is not surprising for one to log on to their Facebook page and find an advertisement of houses for sale on OLX with a link to the site. That is how marketing in the real estate sector has gone high-tech. Here are more: 

Social sites

More and more real estate industry players have social sites to market their products. Social media pages of most developers have photos of their products, others have even videos.

To boost viewership, some pay a premium to the social sites’ management through Visa Card, which gives the pages more views through sharing to other personal users’ timelines.

With instant messaging and profile of users who put the updates made available, following up on leads has been easier. A good example is the Suraya Property Group, which uses their official Facebook page to give updates on their ongoing developments and provide links to their official website for more information.

They also use the platform to advertise jobs and upcoming projects, which they also advertise in local dailies.

Refocusing target market

The housing market seems to focus more on a particular segment, and tends to give a wide berth to emerging markets.

In other countries such as the United States and Britain, real estate players have taken time off to attract investors from Middle East countries such as the United Arab Emirates.

The reason for this is that the real estate market in these developed countries is fairly stable and returns are higher than in any other place in the world.

Middle East countries have also taken cue and are introducing such strategies in Kenya and other sub-Saharan African countries.

It is no surprise to find apartments and town houses in Dubai being advertised in Kenya’s local dailies.

Emaar Properties, a Dubai-based real estate firm that developed the world’s tallest building, Burj Khalifa, is currently targeting wealthy Kenyans for sale of luxury apartments priced at about Sh66 million for a one-bedroom unit.

The lavish apartments in the United Arab Emirates, dubbed The Address Residence Sky View, will feature 532 fully-furnished and serviced apartments and 180 hotel rooms when completed in 2016.

The re-focus of the targeted market has offered a wider market for real estate developers around the globe.

Use of videos

There is nothing new in videos being used in advertisements and marketing. But as times have evolved, so has creative use of videos in marketing real estate properties. Creative use of video, however, is a concept that is just starting to take off as more and more real estate agents and developers begin to feel comfortable stepping away from the ‘herd’.

Los Angeles real estate professional Spencer Krull is a man who gets it and hailed by many critics on the creative use of videos to sell dozens of housing units.

Krull decided that the best way to stand out from the masses of other agents was through the use of humour, in particular, a series of self-effacing funny videos.

California agent, Greg Geilman, who was named by RealEstate.com as Real Estate Pro of the Week in June last year, is another good example of the power of the use of videos in marketing real estate.

In his tutorials, he explains that aside from his “meet-the-agent” video, he hosts additional videos on his website. These feature not only his listings, but testimonials from former clients as well. 

Content marketing

Kenyans have a lot of real estate specialists and professionals who have years of experience on how the industry works. An individual who happens to be a key person in an organisation can use his public figure status as an opportunity to market themselves as a brand, and hence push their organisation’s agenda.

One of the sure ways to do this is through content marketing.

According to Content Marketing Institute Founder, Joe Pulizzi, content marketing is a marketing process to attract and retain customers by consistently creating and curating content in order to change or enhance consumer behaviour.

Content marketing is any marketing format that involves the creation and sharing of media and publishing content in order to acquire customers.

In Kenya, one of the good examples of content marketing is an architect by the name Frank Gichuhi of A4 architects. Through providing industry updates for the local industry, Gichuhi has made his website a one-stop shop for all real estate related problems, making him a top consultant when problems are searched online.

Mobile marketing

According to statistics from the Communications Commission of Kenya, Kenya’s Internet use rose by 11.6 per cent in the three months to December last year, pushed up by high mobile phone usage and stiff competition among service providers. Kenya now has 14.5 million mobile users.

The mobile phone has become vital tool, which marketers use to market their products. Marketing through SMS — Short Message Service — became increasingly popular in the early 2000s in Europe and some parts of Asia and Africa when businesses started to collect mobile phone numbers and sending off wanted or unwanted content.

With the increasing widespread use of smart phones, app usage has also greatly increased. Therefore, mobile marketers have increasingly taken advantage of smart phone apps as a marketing resource. This allows for direct engagement, payment, and targeted advertising.

Another way to ensure mobile phone users can easily access web pages is through having a mobile site option for a company’s web pages.

Offering seller finance option

In the current mortgage market, the interest rates are considered very high compared to rates in developed countries such as the US and South Africa.

During the 2008 housing bubble in the US, a new method of trying to sell housing units emerged during the credit crunch, when financial institutions such as banks were hesitant to lend finance to buy property, fearing bad debts due to hard and risky economic climate.

The new marketing technique was referred to as Seller Finance Facility. Seller financing is a loan provided by the seller of a property or business to the purchaser without the involvement of any financial institution such as banks.

The purchaser makes a down payment to the seller and makes monthly installment payments from thereon over a specified time, at an agreed-upon interest rate, until the loan is fully repaid.

In a layman’s term, the Seller Finance Option is whereby the seller in a transaction offers the buyer a loan rather than the buyer obtaining one from a bank.