The Google/Double Click deal's impact on online real estate marketing
By Patrick Kitano, Monday, April 16, 2007.How will Google's acquisition of Double Click impact online real estate advertising? Not much... most online real estate advertising is of the "long tail" variety. Double Click is essentially a banner or image ad serving company that works with ad agencies, a B2B play, while most real estate online advertising is bought by individual broker offices and agents and are targeted to a local audience. According to a California Association of Realtors survey, agents market themselves online as follows:
Top Websites Used in Agents' Marketing Strategy (California)
| Personal website | 61% |
| Brokerage website | 61% |
| Realtor.com | 58% |
| Yahoo RE / Housevalues | 18% |
| Craigslist | 17% |
| ca.realtor.com | 8% |
| 5% |
In addition, new real estate specific advertising models, including Zillow's EZ Ads and other mapping or listing-based models will start to gain traction based on their location specific targeting.
Google's acquisition of DoubleClick has been lauded as key to Google's aspiration to lockup the online ad market from top to bottom. At Transparent today, I discuss why the acquisition has potential philosophical issues - for example, Google's customer centric ad placement model threatens to disintermediate the ad placement professionals (i.e. advertising agencies) that are Double Click's clients.
Update: Google announced this morning that it will provide a radio ad placement platform for Clear Channel online radio stations. On Transparent, I discuss how Google will open up radio ads to the masses, particularly the real estate community (mortgage brokers already understand the medium), via the easy to use Google ad purchasing interface similar to the one that made Adwords popular.
--Pat Kitano, Transparent Real Estate
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