4 Stats REALTORS Use That Auctioneers Don’t

A lot of airports use their interior billboards to advertise their respective metro area’s appeal. Usually, the signs tout the city’s hospitals, higher education, technology, entertainment district, or headquarters of international corporations. Walking through Cleveland Hopkins International Airport, I saw one that fit in none of these categories.

The headline: “Within 500 miles of 43% of the US population.”

I turned to my wife and asked, “What do I do with that information?” I mean, what difference does it make how many people live within 500 miles? That had to be the first time I’ve seen anyone bragging about 43% of anything. So weird.

I’ve actually seen an auctioneer do something similar, advertising a property as only 300 miles from a metro area. I’ve also seen a local real estate agent list Colonial Williamsburg—170 miles from here—as a “local attraction.” (I’ve lived here 13.5 years and never been there.)

Statistics can be powerful tools, though—especially when they support your assertions. I’ve seen small businesses take big sales away from large firms by capturing, sorting, analyzing, and explaining data their competition either didn’t have or didn’t use.

My wife and I live in a fast-growing subdivision in my area. People who don’t live in our subdivision get on our neighborhood’s Facebook page to ask if anyone’s thinking of moving. It’s in high demand because it’s the closest new subdivision to the schools in a coveted district. Also, we have the lowest property tax rates in the area. So, buyer agents are looking for sellers; and one local REALTOR tried to use statistics to tease us to leave.

If you’re auctioning real estate, you should consider using the statistics leveraged on this postcard in your seller presentations. In the seller proposals and presentations I’ve been asked to design over the last 13 years, I don’t need all of the fingers on one hand to count the times I’ve seen any of these used.

Number of Nearby Properties Sold

Only an absolute auction guarantees a sale, but you can give all sellers confidence in the market to bring buyers—if this number is significant. If it’s a low number, you can use that to educate sellers and massage their expectations. If you have a breakdown of properties auctioned vs. properties listed, this stat increases significantly in value.

Local Market Sales Rate

This information is apparently easy to find, because I’ve had multiple REALTOR friends show me this data at different times. This number compliments the first statistic and can give context to expectations. While a metro area or county might be trending one way on the aggregate, a specific slice of it may not. This is true of commercial, industrial, and agricultural real estate, too—even though the statistics might be harder to find or less concentrated than residential numbers.

Average Days on the Market

If this number is high, the time benefit of an auction will seem that much more valuable. If this number is low, the timeline of an auction is actually longer. In that case, you have to sell the competitive-frenzy aspect of auctions. Also, knowing this number might help you in your due diligence to know whether you should take the auction in the first place. (This number might be skewed a bit for our neighborhood, since builders often list their homes very early in the construction phase.)

List Price to Sale Price Average

This stat can indicate that sellers have good sales agents and/or that local comps are reliable, or it can suggest the opposite. If the number is above 100%, you can make the case for the value of a competitive-bidding marketplace. If it’s drastically below 100%, you can discuss how well-marketed auctions—not comps and appraisals—determine market value.

Auctioneers regularly tell me how much they want to work with REALTORS. Maybe they should first pursue working with their statistics.

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Postcard scanned. Stock cover image purchased from iStockPhoto.com.

151: 5 Ways to Know If Your Offline Media is Working

Thanks to Google Analytics, it’s both free and easy now to track individual banner ads, listing pages, and social media posts. For auction companies with certain kinds of online bidding platforms, it’s also now possible to decipher which of those digital media directly produce bidders and buyers.

But how do you know if your physical media is working? How do you A/B test to know what headlines and photos and layouts make your offline media more effective?

Tangible media like signs, print ads, and direct mail can be tracked, but it’s less scientific. Like email reporting, uncontrollable variables make accurate reporting all but impossible. Collected data might be insightful and potentially representative, though, even if it’s not exhaustive or proportional.

There are five basic ways to track your offline media’s performance. Each comes with at least one drawback to compliment the data it provides. You can use several of these at once per medium to get a bigger, better picture of their efficacy and efficiency.

Custom QR Codes

QR codes are free to generate. You can create custom URLs with Google URL Builder that allow you to tag the media type (or publication), the campaign name, and more. You can create multiple custom URLs for the same campaign—one each per advertising expression. You can then convert each of those URLs into different QR codes to place in different advertising media. Google Analytics will then report their results separately.

The downside to this tracking method is the QR code itself. In the time it takes to find their QR code reader app on their phone and then scan the code, the recipient is more likely to just Google search your company or asset—or ask Siri to search for them. Then, your recipient shows up in Google Analytics as an organic search result. Nobody, even Google, can tell you what medium led someone to search for your assets, events, or services.

Alternate URLs

URLs are cheap, especially in proportion to most of the hundreds of campaign budgets I see each year. The idea here is to use different web addresses in different media. When the recipient types in that address, they are redirected to your website (or a landing page on your site). Google Analytics shows this as a referring site in your audience acquisition list.

Believe it or not, but my clients and I have been able to easily find great URLs to use. One of my clients uses the same URLs for the same individual media across all campaigns. I also have clients who buy URLs for specific auctions, especially when they’re working outside of their normal asset category or normal geographic area.

The biggest mistake I see made with this method is choosing long or complicated URLs. There are a lot of options, if you use the word “bid” instead of “buy” or “auction.” Once you make it easier to Google your company name, these URLs become less likely to be used—let alone accurately trackable.

I’ve talked to entrepreneurs worried about diluting their URL branding with this method. If you do a good job branding your media and crafting your online user experience, though, consumers will remember your brand. Every day, we click on tons of links with a gazillion characters. Alternate URLs will not be a consumer deterrent.

Multiple Phone Numbers

For half a century, advertisers have used different phone numbers in different media to track interactions. Multiple service providers now allow you to plug multiple phone numbers into an online tracking system. On top of recording phone calls and showing you at what point in your phone tree they hung up, some of these companies can even tie these phone call statistics into Google Analytics.

The Internet has nurtured more and more of Western Culture into self-helpers. A large portion of Americans would rather text than engage in a phone call. An even greater percentage of people would rather grab information online than ask a sales representative, especially over the phone. So, you might not get enough phone traffic to give you actionable intel.

Personal URLs (PURLs)

This variable-data technology creates a URL with custom codes at the end of a branded URL. Often times, advertisers use the recipient’s name as the part that follows the “/“ in the web address. You can point these URLs to custom landing pages or to websites with variable data that conforms to a subscriber’s stated interests. (Universities use this when mailing to high schoolers, since the motivations for college life are diverse.) Service providers offer both proprietary reporting and integration with Google Analytics.

Again, the challenge here is to make the URL as short as possible or as appealing as possible. You have to sell the recipient’s personal benefit of that destination enough to overcome the cumbersome amount of typing. Otherwise, the user is likely to Google search around your extra effort.

Transactional Polling

For onsite events and live transactions it’s easy to ask bidders and buyers how they heard about your auction. It can also be a required multiple-choice toggle for online bidding. Since purchasers are more valuable than online viewers, this is the most important analytic to capture.

The problem is that self-reporting has proven to be suspect at times. For one thing, bidders or buyers sometimes can’t remember where they learned about your auction. (One of my clients had bidders report a medium he didn’t even use.) For another, some people will inadvertently report the medium they prefer. If your other media tracking runs parallel with your polling results, this data is valuable, though.

In a digital world, print media has the potential to be a tangible disruptor and a more personal interaction. Direct mail allows a broader range of sizes and formats than online media. When produced and placed well, signs are often the leading medium for obtaining auction buyers. Just because it’s more difficult to track them doesn’t mean they are necessarily less effective.

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Stock image purchased from iStockPhoto.com