Skilpad.Com Community Blog

Social media like facebook and twitter continue to change the way that people interact. But are they effective in real estate marketing?

If you have experience or knowledge of successful social media marketing of real estate, I would love you to comment on this post. I would be especially interested if you have pertinent feedback on marketing South Africa real estate.

Powerful, yes. But can it be harnessed?.

My gut feel is that while social media are nothing short of revolutionary when it comes to connecting people for genuinely social reasons, they will not so easily be harnessed by marketers to promote their products and services — or properties.

Social media evangelists state somewhat provocatively that social media “are the economy” and that soon we won’t search for products and services, they will find us! I agree that certain standout products and services will benefit enormously as a result of online friends recommending them to one another. But I wonder if marketers will be able to utilise this peer-to-peer-recommendation potential at will. I suspect that the ever expanding army of social media users will become skilled at filtering out “spam”.

But even as I write, great marketing minds are eyeing the spoils and preparing their campaigns. What are your thoughts and experiences?

Selling game farms and hunting farms is what we do at African Showcase Realtors. But marketing a hunting concession on a private farm is new for us and is possibly a first in South Africa.

On offer is a US$ 420 000 concession to hunt on a top Eastern Cape farm for 5 to 8 years. The investor and his guests stand to make a 10% annual return on investment through discounted game prices. Furthermore the investor will be assured of 4-star accommodation on-site during hunting trips (quality of accommodation close to hunting locations is a bugbear with many overseas hunters). The owner of the farm, who plans to use the concession income for game fencing, purchasing more game and upgrading the lodge, believes that potential investors who might otherwise have considered buying a game farm in South Africa might prefer this route as they get to enjoy the benefits without taking on the risk and hassle of running a farm.

Read more about this ground-breaking marketing intiative here.

Skilpad.Com Property Portal has introduced two new tools that enable estate agents to add video clips to their property listings.

With these tools agents can choose to add video to their listings via the Internet or directly from their cellphones.

One of the goals of Skilpad.Com has been to provide estate agents with a really easy new way of adding impact and useful visual information to their property listings. Video was chosen as the ideal medium to achieve this goal as most estate agents already routinely use digital cameras and cellphones with video capabilities. The new Skilpad.Com tools simply make it quick and easy to transfer this video directly to the desired property advertisements on the property portal. The video tutorials at how to add video to property listings show just how easily this can be done.

To the best of our knowledge, Skillpad.Com is the first property portal in South Africa to provide its users with video tools. It is also, possibly, the first in the world to offer a tool that uploads video directly from cellphone to agents’ property listings.