Complete Story
12/01/2016
Can local media find a new home in real estate?
Ah, real estate. It used to be such a wonderfully profitable sweet spot for newspapers, back in the dear, now-dead days before the Web. And now it’s just a shadow of its former self.
The real estate business itself is doing okay these days, although it always has its ups and downs. It’s print real estate advertising in newspapers that’s been deeply and permanently disrupted.
The question I’m trying to answer these days is, isn’t there another model through which local media companies can play key roles in the real estate market?
This year, local real estate advertising is projected to be a $5.6 billion a year business in the United States, down 6.7%, according to a recent Borrell Associates report. And the newspaper share of it is down to just 12.5%, while online/digital advertising is now at 53.4%.
The migration of real estate ad dollars from print to digital happened with shocking speed beginning in the late 1990s, along with automotive and recruitment advertising. The Big Three, as we called them back then, simply work much better online than in print.
