Nextdoor, a private social network covering more than 150,000 neighborhoods in the U.S., has announced a real estate section and new ad product for real estate agents.
The company is officially launching the offering, which Nextdoor has been testing for some time, in 10 markets to start: the greater Atlanta area, Austin, San Francisco Bay Area, Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Portland, Sacramento, and San Diego.
It’s a natural fit for the social network, where innumerable conversations about real estate take place and users often recommend their past agents to neighbors, said Nextdoor CEO Nirav Tolia on stage at Connect.
Users can click over to a real estate section to view listings in their neighborhood. Listing details pages show price, property descriptions, photos and nearby listings.
The real estate section sources listings directly from brokers at the moment, rather than through syndicators. (Nextdoor didn’t immediately respond when asked what fees brokers have to pay to get their listings to appear on Nextdoor, if any.)
Agents can purchase “branded listings” to appear in ads next to their listings. The ads include an “Ask a question” button and can show endorsements by neighbors.
Branded listings cost between $50 and $125 a month, Tolia said on stage, without specifying if that was the cost per listing or a flat fee for a number of listings.
Agents can also pay to become the “neighborhood sponsor” of a ZIP code. This product gives the agent exposure in users’ news feeds (including the top of listing search results pages), the local real estate section and daily emails.
“This will ensure that when a neighbor thinks about real estate, your name is the first name that comes to mind,” he said.
Sponsorships cost from $100 to $500 a month, Tolia said.
To purchase Nextdoor’s real estate ads, professionals must first create or claim a free Nextdoor “Local Page” — which can represent either an individual or a business.
Nextdoor advises racking up recommendations from clients and friends on local pages, so the endorsements can be noted in or appear alongside ads.
The ad product was a natural monetization strategy for Nextdoor. Users have tens of thousands of conversations about real estate everyday, and of the millions of recommendations made on the social network, about 5 percent have been for real estate agents, he said.
Real estate agents are also “overwhelmingly the largest category of Local Page” claimed on the site, while more than 22,000 haven’t claimed their pages, according to Nextdoor.
