MINNEAPOLIS - Edina Realty President Bob Peltier recently announced ambitious plans to tap into the growing pool of twenty- and thirtysomething home buyers by beefing up the company’s Web site, hiring younger sales agents and redirecting its ad dollars to non-traditional venues.

“To move forward over the next five to 10 years, we have to be positioned differently than we have been in the past,” Peltier said.

At the heart of these shifts in corporate strategy is research that says 80 percent of all home buyers start their search on the Web.

“I think there are plenty of tools we can continue to add,” he said. “There’s no question the tech age is the information age. . . . The more information we can give the better the buyer we’ll have.”

Peltier, the younger brother of Ron Peltier, chief executive of Edina Realty and parent company HomeServices of America, said developing a sophisticated Web site packed with statistics, data and information about the market will help draw more buyers and sellers who fall into the Gen X and Gen Y age group, which he estimates at 121 million.

To that end, the company is pursuing marketing relationships with search engines such as Trulia, Google, MSN and Yahoo.

Already, the company has created a searchable database that lets users check the previous sale price for houses sold through the Regional Multiple Listing Service.

And in the coming year, Edina Realty plans to buy the rights to the coding and software used by cyberhomes.com, a national Web site that uses a variety of sources to establish home values in an instant.

To reflect the company’s changing philosophy, Edina Realty plans to redirect a much greater share of its $7.5 million to $8 million in advertising spending to sources that will direct viewers to the company’s Web site.

That means a 50 percent reduction in traditional print media advertising and a shift toward media more commonly frequented by Gen X and Gen Y readers, including alternative weekly publications, electronic billboards, regular radio spots and the Internet.

Recruiting younger agents will also be part of the company’s strategy. Recent research from the National Association of Realtors shows a growing gap between the median age of the average home buyer and the average Realtor.

This new strategy represents a shift in the way sales agents viewed themselves and their jobs. At the dawn of the Internet age a decade ago, many sales agents were threatened by the increasingly fat pipeline of information available to buyers and sellers. Many resisted early attempts to share information about listings and sales data with other agents and the public.

The shift started with the move away from printed listings and sold books toward Internet listings. Then came broker reciprocity, which allowed various companies to share listing information. And then last year, Edina Realty built a searchable data base of sale information that it now posts on its Web site after the board of the Regional Multiple Listing Service decided to allow sold data to be made available.

What does all this portend for the role of real estate agents in this new world? Bob Peltier said agents will be just as needed as ever. Increasingly, their role will be to help buyers and sellers synthesize the growing amount of information they now have access to, he said.

Hoarding that information will no longer serve the industry, he added. “Information is free and plentiful. So that’s no longer an option.”

Source:

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