Study finds big marketing opportunity for "hyperlocal" expertise

Real estate professionals admit that they’re failing to deliver when it comes to providing hyperlocal knowledge of specific housing markets, according to a new survey.

The newly published Hyperlocal Real Estate Survey, commissioned by the startup zavvie and conducted by the WAV Group, found that most agents admit they’ve failed to get the message across about their local neighborhood expertise in their marketing outreach.

Some 95 percent of 350 real estate professionals surveyed said local market knowledge is “very important” or “extremely important” for their clients. But just 12 percent of respondents say their marketing specializes in specific neighborhoods.

“Agents, teams and broker-owner, and execs are saying one thing and are doing another,” said Lane Hornung, CEO and co-founder of zavvie, a hyperlocal marketing platform. “The survey clearly shows their marketing activities are not consistent with hyperlocal being an actual priority. … In fact, the study found that most real estate professionals are doing the exact opposite of hyperlocal marketing: They are casting the largest net, trying to throw down their marketing circle as broad as possible.”

zavvie describes “hyperlocal” agents and teams as those whose marketing activities are focused on a specific neighborhood or group of neighborhoods that comprise an average of 3,000 homes.

It said that 60 percent of survey respondents claim to specialize in a large regional or metro area, something it claims is unpractical.

“It’s an oxymoron to specialize in a metro area,” said Stefan Peterson, COO of zavvie. “You can’t even specialize in a city or a town—it’s just too big of an area, geographically, to be a ‘go-to expert’ that knows every single home in that size of a market. Yet that’s what folks were claiming.”

The survey also found that only a few agents are using hyperlocal marketing platforms such as the Nextdoor social media site (just 17 percent), neighborhood websites (15 percent) or a personal blog (7 percent). That’s despite the fact that most real estate professionals claim to be either “extremely knowledgeable” or “very knowledgeable” about local news and events that could impact housing markets.

“The truth is, for busy agents, social media, and hyperlocal marketing tools and activities such as neighborhood websites and blogs are hard—they typically take a considerable amount of time and resources to create and maintain,” Peterson said. “But for those who invest the time and the effort, the deeper data we collected shows that hyperlocal marketing delivers significant results for those that employ it.”