You only have to read a little bit of the research done by Tom Peters or
Marti Barletta, who co-authored the book Trends, to identify that there is a massive niche within the real estate industry that is currently be ignored by most of the major franchise groups.

Now, in no way am I suggesting that Ray White should become Raylene White or that RE/MAX should become RE/MAXINE, all I’m suggesting is that women have an enormous influence in the buying decisions within most households & over the past few years there’s been an enormous growth in companies marketing women’s only services.

And, a lot of it is to do with The Role of Gender in Source Credibility & the feeling that “both men and women perceived that they would have more credibility with persons of the same sex than with persons of the opposite sex”.

Many companies outside of real estate, that have moved to a ‘Women – Only’ based business model have found it to be an extremely lucrative niche & have enjoyed the rewards from embracing their targeted point of difference.

For example, there are hugely successful women-only companies like White Lady Funerals, plus women-only gymnasiums like Fernwood & Contours who all seem to have taken huge segments of their marketplace by storm by using their “Women-Only Business Model”.

Billicorp Property Services Takes On The Big Boys
Currently, within the Commercial/Industrial sector of the real estate industry, (normally a male dominated segment of the industry), there’s been an emerging women – only company called Billicorp Property Solutions, founded in 2003 by a dynamic young agent, Kirsten Marsh, who successfully entered the market & built a women-only team to take on some of the biggest firms within the real estate industry.

For a small team within a single agency structure, they appear to be doing extremely well, considering the tough market place they are in & the impact the GFC has had on that segment of the market.

In recent times, Billicorp has also expanded its service into the residential market place, which will be interesting to see how this transition works for them.

Now, because most women are intuitive, extremely good at networking, more likely to be trusted & are often very well organised, you’ll find that there are already many women working within real estate sales & property management amongst the franchise groups/networks who are currently using their skills to achieve huge success in real estate.

Plus, like a lot of experienced agents would understand, they tend to appreciate that during a listing presentation, if the woman of the house doesn’t like & trust you then chances are that you won’t get the listing, no matter how good you got along with the male partner.

Whilst I don’t profess to be an expert on branding a company & nor am I taking sides about male v’s female agents, I simply see that an opportunity exists & think maybe a ‘Women’s – Only” brand within an existing brand could be a way forward for one of the franchise groups who may want to tackle this huge, untapped niche in the market.

Interested to hear your thoughts?

Most major real estate groups will conduct regular brand surveys to gauge just how their brand is positioned into the marketplace. They are normally conducted through expensive surveys. Results often include statistics for prompted and unprompted  awareness of your brand.  Naturally these reports focus on the brand that engaged them… the group paying the bill.  They always seem to emphasise the good news and rarely position the brand to the whole industry.

One way to measure a brands effectiveness is what the public are actually searching for. Google released a product awhile back called Google Insights for Search which you can compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, time frames and properties.

Google Insight gives us a great way to compare the relative brand strength of different brands right around the country and even broken down into each state.  Please note that this represents how many people are searching for these names and in no way represents web traffic. Realestate.com.au and Domain.com.au would win on a pure traffic count hands down but when it comes to what the public searches for they are not the number one brand in Australia.

That it turns out was Ray White and accordingly I have used them as a baseline  for this first comparison. If you want to compare another industry brand yourself that I have not included make sure you include Ray White in the website to compare, region of Australia, select 2009 and then the Real Estate Category as per this screenshot below (click to enlarge).

Google Insights for Search only allows you to do 5 searches at a time so each search was done with Ray White to keep the baseline accurate and then all results were manually collated to show us the following results.

Google Insights also lets us look at the trend for each brand. The following graphs show the change for 2009 to date in groups of 5. Each graph also has a category line for Real Estate (black line) which is a common baseline to compare them against.

Also, please note the “Totals” differ to those above because they are ranking only the brands listed and there is not common baseline used such as Ray White above. You can click on the trending graphs to view a larger version.

The last thing that Google Insights lets us have a look at for brand awareness is a breakdown to a state level. In the following examples we look at each of the brands and how they fair in each state.

The darker the colour the stronger that brand is in that state.

(edit: You should only use these to compare the strength of a brand in one state to another.  You cannot compare one brands to another brand using these maps.  See the comments below)

RE/MAX claims:

“While many of the real estate industry’s biggest players are scaling back their TV buys due to economic realities, the RE/MAX share of voice for national TV advertising jumped from 50% in 2008 to 99.9% in the first quarter of 2009.”

RE/MAX have done a good job with their new straight talking  TV ads, but I can’t help but think that they could increase their audience by leveraging their video content across the internet via their huge network of agents/staff, databases of clients and via social media.

Whilst it was great to see that RE/MAX have taken the initiative & leveraged their video content by uploading the commercials onto YouTube, unfortunately that’s where their effective use of the internet for these videos seems to grind to a halt.

The collective online marketing power of a franchise like RE/MAX is enormous.

They have something like 100,000 Associates working within their company & their LeadStreet campaign successfully created a database of a Million More Leads in Six Months for US Agents, yet upon writing this post the Kick – 2009 RE/MAX Commercial is the video that appears to be their most popular out of their 2009 commercials uploaded onto YouTube so far, but it’s had less than 10,000 views over the past 4 months.

How to Promote Your Real Estate Videos Online

Here’s just a few ways that real estate franchises & independent offices could use the power of their existing network to help promote their brand, generate lots of Free traffic to their videos & enhance their online marketing presence.

• Share the videos on Facebook, MySpace, forums, etc.

• Embed the YouTube video within a short blog post.

• Include a link to the video within email marketing campaigns.

• Tweet about the video on Twitter.

Imagine the power of marketing that 100,000 RE/MAX Associates could have if they used some of these strategies to promote these professionally created TV Commercials out to their network of clients & associates via the internet.

If each Associate only got 10 people in a month to view the commercial, that would equate to approx. 1 million viewers per month for FREE.

In fact, if RE/MAX franchise really wanted to, they could get 10′s of millions of viewers to their videos each month at almost no cost. Now that’s what I’d call a powerful message.

Finally, there are over 100 alternative video sites other than YouTube. Real estate franchises should be uploading their videos/TV commercials onto some of these other sites as well to help generate even more FREE traffic & exposure of their brand.