The name of the game in real estate marketing has always been print, signage, and Main Street storefronts showcasing the latest listings. While East Hampton Village still has about a dozen storefronts where potential buyers can swoon over photographs of what’s for sale, the marketing is shifting.
Just three years ago Diane Saatchi of Saunders wrote that digital photos reigned supreme in advertising. Now agents are saying digital images are not enough. An online presence and lifestyle brand is what more and more agents are turning to.
Jenna Van Asco, who together with her husband, Joseph Van Asco, works as an agent with Douglas Elliman in Sag Harbor and Montauk, has 18,200 followers of her Instagram account Eastendmermaid. She created the lifestyle page based on her experience with customers who she says want more out of their buying experience. “Highlighting the Hamptons lifestyle, experiences, and things to do naturally helps us showcase our listings in a new way beyond listing photos and property descriptions,” Mr. Van Asco said.
Sarah Minardi, a 20-year veteran of the business and associate broker, agrees. “People want the inside scoop,” she said late last month.
“It’s been the same thing for 50 years,” she said of real estate advertising, adding that the company she works for, Saunders, started sensing a shift in marketing patterns about 10 years ago. She said her advertising budget was “100-percent print” when she started in 2007. The Van Ascos said they “spend the bulk of advertising dollars on social media ads and put a lot of effort into our online presence.”
When Saunders created an email marketing platform for newsletters, Ms. Minardi created Minardi’s Mentions, where she says she talked about the community and “not just about homes.” The reaction to the new media was positive.
With the expansion of Zillow, an internet-based real estate advertising platform, customers were able to shop for houses from home. Scrolling through photos without any human attachment had a profound effect at first, but eventually a malaise took over. Those ads weren’t driving the business they once did. Ms. Minardi says the site often drives scammers to agents, which in turn creates a need for labor-intensive vetting of messages.
Mr. Van Asco said he and his wife completely divested from Zillow years ago.
Christine Merser, the owner of Slate Spark, a nationwide marketing company, says while change has come, “it’s not coming fast enough.”
Ms. Van Asco was noticing an increasing trend in requests for things to do in the Hamptons from customers. She and her husband also started with an email flier and then transitioned to content located mostly on Instagram. Followers can see Ms. Van Asco go out to dinner and coffee, pick flowers at local farms, and visit local parks and beaches. This year, the couple is going to focus more heavily on YouTube, the video sharing website.
Several of Ms. Van Asco’s videos have gone viral — racking up millions of views. Viral content is described as something spreading across multiple platforms that can sustain attention for weeks or months.
Ms. Merser, who lived in East Hampton for 40 years, says that real estate in the Hamptons is fickle. “What fascinates me is the gap between how deeply personal and identity-driven a house purchase is, particularly on the East End, and how transactional the marketing often remains. The Hamptons is not a commodity market. It’s layered with history, lifestyle, architecture, seasonal psychology, and highly specific buyer demographics.” She suggested that marketing has had to change to reflect that.
“Imagine if Chanel led with ‘black jacket, two buttons . . .’ “ she said, noting that “homes are more intimate than handbags” but have been marketed like commodities. Real estate advertising always leads with the number of bedrooms and bathrooms, but she said the market itself is demanding change. Other industries have made the change ahead of real estate. Hotel rooms are not about price anymore but experiences, cars less about horsepower and more about lifestyle.
“Real estate is constantly in motion . . . it didn’t have to work. Now it needs to,” she said this week. Scrolling through photos isn’t enough for many buyers. “It’s no longer believable,” she said.
Ms. Minardi said her own trajectory has mirrored that development. Her newsletter morphed into a video series during the Covid-19 epidemic called “Sarah on the Stoop” and a new series is in the works that she is calling “Sarah on the Sand.” The evolution of her marketing has changed from a focus on selling herself to selling the right house to the right person — starting with connecting to the people in the marketplace.
The Van Ascos and Ms. Minardi seem to agree that with the rise of artificial intelligence it is more important than ever to build their brands in public. “People need to speak with a live human being,” Ms. Minardi said.
“You need to depict a good story” in order for people to know you’re a real person doing authentic things, Ms. Van Asco said. Ms. Minardi says that extends to traditional photographs too. Touching up images is par for the course, but some ads can trend toward pure fiction. She says Saunders regulates its altered images carefully.
While the agents see A.I. as a hurdle, Ms. Merser sees A.I. as a game changer for the industry. If used properly, she says the technology could identify buyers to whom agents could then market directly. Real estate agents will hold the key to that information.
So what, in the end, happens to print advertising and the other traditional models? As far as Ms. Minardi is concerned, print will never go away entirely. She says she feels it is still important to support local newspapers. But she acknowledges, “videos get a lot of hits.”
Ms. Merser says print is still important but unless the advertising has a call to action, it will not work. She added that she predicts that traditional real estate marketing models may disappear completely.
Ultimately, people buy from people, they all say. “Work with someone you trust,” Ms. Minardi says. Agents, says Ms. Merser, will in due course become more relevant than ever when they leverage the technology at their fingertips.
