- Realtor.com is connecting millennial consumers and agents with its clever five-part, first-time homebuyer video series.
- Realtor.com targeted the humorous videos to millennials, who make up the nation's largest generation of homebuyers.
- Videos focused on the latter part of the homebuying process received fewer views.
Real estate portals are in the business of capturing the hearts and minds of both consumers and the people on whose backs they’ve built their multimillion-dollar empires: real estate agents.
Realtor.com has brought the two together, in a way, with its five-part video series targeted toward the almighty millennial, which breaks down the homebuying process for first-time buyers with realtor.com tools featured throughout.
Millennials — those born between 1980 and 1995 — represent the nation’s largest homebuying generation, and they love agents.
The portal’s celebrity spokeswoman, Elizabeth Banks, stars in the humorous videos, which launched this spring as part of its revamped marketing campaign. Realtor.com gave agents the ability to embed the videos on their own Web pages.
“Don’t be an idiot.” In other words, “live within your budget,” Banks quips in one video.
Realtor.com’s chief competitors Zillow and Trulia — united under Zillow Group — also offer first-time homebuying guides to consumers.
View counts of realtor.com’s videos drop drastically after the first video, because fewer consumers get past the dreaming phase and, presumably, those who do get further along in the homebuying process rely more and more on agents.
See the videos below:
1. Knowing When You’re Ready (Over 775,000 views)
2. Mortgage Lending (Over 16,000 views)
3. The Search (Over 13,000 views)
4. The Offer (Over 10,000 views)
5. The Sale (over 10,000 views)
“We want everyone to think of realtor.com as the best real-time resource to help them make the most informed real estate decisions,” said Andrew Strickman, Move’s head of brand and chief creative, earlier this summer when the portal released the videos.
“Our knowledge that many buyers turn to the Web first for help navigating one of life’s most important decisions and the fact that many first-time buyers prefer to consume entertainment digitally drove the development of the content,” he added.
