It used to be a little bit creepy, but now it’s just the way the internet works: You go online, search for something like shoes or a blender or the lawnmower with the most customer reviews, and then immediately start seeing ads for that same product all over the internet.
And now, that same targeted ad experience is coming to the luxury real estate space thanks to a new product from Luxury Portfolio International and Adwerx.
The new product will allow brokerage and luxury listing platform Luxury Portfolio International to deliver targeted ads from the 50,000 properties it markets across the web. After someone views a property on Luxury Portfolio’s website, they’ll start seeing banner ads for that same property following them as they visit other, unrelated websites.
Stephanie Anton
“The plan is to target each person multiple times,” Stephanie Anton, Luxury Portfolio’s president, told Inman. “It’s a huge scale.”
Luxury Portfolio markets high-end properties for more than 500 brokerages and companies around the world.
For example, Luxury Portfolio’s website currently includes listings for a “palatial millionaire’s masterpiece” in South Africa, a “stylish oasis” in Texas and a “stunning waterfront architectural estate home” in Canada — all of which cost multiple millions of dollars. Thanks to the new targeted ads, people who searched for those kinds of properties will continue to see them flashed across the web.
Brokerages that have joined Luxury Portfolio’s network will have their listings promoted in target ads for no additional cost. The company declined to say how much it costs to become a part of the network.
The targeted ads will be generated for all properties outside the European Union (due to the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR). Luxury Portfolio operates in more than 70 countries, and Anton said it saw 3 million visitors to its website last year. That means the company expects many millions of targeted ads to pop up on people’s computer screens in the coming months.
Much like other sites such as Amazon, the new targeted real estate ads will use cookies to track the browsing behavior of visitors to Luxury Portfolio’s website. Anton described the process of creating and distributing the ads as “amplifying the marketing” of the agents and brokerages behind the listings.
Jed Carlson
Luxury Portfolio has been working for years with Adwerx, which focuses on digital real estate marketing. But in an email, Adwerx CEO Jed Carlson told Inman that the scale of the targeted ad project “is simply unprecedented and was feasible because of the unique relationship we have with Luxury Portfolio and our experience with automation.”
“Luxury Portfolio is the first to bring this type of automation to market,” Carlson explained. “What we’re doing is very special because we’re creating and running customized ads for every listing possible.”
Carlson also said that people could end up seeing ads for Luxury Portfolio listings on popular websites from companies such as the New York Times, CNN, ESPN and others.
The targeted ads will run for the next year and Anton said that in the future the project could become more sophisticated. But in the meantime, her company is waiting to see how potential customers respond.
“We’re reminding people to come back,” she said of the purpose for the ads. “I’ll be curious to see how it works out.”
Correction: This post has been updated to reflect that Luxury Portfolio is part of Leading Real Estate Companies of the World, which has a brokerage license but does not operate as a brokerage. Luxury Portfolio is not a brokerage itself.