Advertising real estate via a book just
wasn’t cutting it for Real Living
Realty One anymore, so the company expanded its reach by launching
RealtyOne.com The Magazine.

The magazine is available on newsstands
and provides links to Realty One’s Web site
for more information.

“You use the Net for its advantage, which
is way more information and pictures,”
says Barbara Ann Reynolds, president of
Real Living Realty One. “You use print also
as an adjunct and support to the Internet.”

Reynolds says the company started investigating the benefits of using the Internet in
the late 1990s. Although the use of the
Internet as an advertising tool seems like a
no-brainer, Reynolds says that wasn’t the
case: Any time you are transforming the
way you have traditionally communicated
to a consumer, there are questions surrounding a change.

“Is it going to be accepted?” she says. “Is
the public going to be ready for this? Do
they just as well want print and don’t care?
Those are all challenges.”

Reynolds says she first tried to get everyone internally on the same page by spending a lot of time in focus groups with
employees and agents, who have day-today contact with customers. It took more
than a year of engaging people in what the
future would look like, what was happening in other industries with technology and
how the company might adapt before she
made a move.

“At the time, there were a great many that
considered the Internet a threat to
Realtors,” she says.

Fast forward to 2007, when Reynolds
looked at Saks Fifth Avenue and Nordstrom
to see how they use their catalogs and the
Internet to market their products.

“If you look at any of those catalogs, at
the bottom, it directs you to the Net,” she
says. “It is from that I am taking a retail
approach, also knowing full well there is a
good marriage between print and Internet.
We tend to want to make it exclusively the
Internet or exclusively print, and it’s both.”

Reynolds says the pluses of using the
Internet to market far outweigh the minuses because it is a great way to educate customers, and “an educated consumer is your
best customer in the end,” she says.

Several years ago, in an effort to understand what the customer was thinking,
Real Living Realty One invested in a large
amount of consumer research. And it went
a step further and did individual interviews
with people who used the services of its
competitors.

“We always stay out in front of our competition,” Reynolds says. “Whatever that
takes.”

And for companies that have not yet fully
embraced the Internet, Reynolds has this
advice: Look at it as if it were the opening
of the company’s biggest store.

“I would say, when you are doing a Web
site, consider it your No. 1 biggest store
because it has everything in it,” she says.
“It’s the Wal-Mart superstore of any company. It is opening the doors of your company
to a broad reach. If you look at the Internet
as every little piece is a different department, you can go to every department.”

Overall, Reynolds said using the Internet
heavily to market properties was an evolution for Real Living Realty One.

“The Internet offers so much to the public,” she says. “There is still a person that
lingers with print, but it helps them realize
print is great, but go to the Net because
there are so many more things we can offer
you on the Internet, so much more information in real time and so much content. It
is bridging those two things and making
sure we are supporting 100 percent of the
public.”

HOW TO REACH: Real Living Realty One, (866) 438-7315 or
http://realtyone.realliving.com

The Digital Age

Real Living Realty One isn’t only using
the Internet as a way of reinventing its
marketing campaign; it has also invested in billboards, including the 180-foot
by 40-foot former “Goodyear” board
above I-77 and I-480 to advertise realtyone.com.

The company is also using digital billboards, which can change messages
instantly, according to Barbara
Reynolds, president of Real Living
Realty One.

But companies should be ready to pay
to advertise on the signs. According to
the Akron Beacon Journal, Clear
Channel division President Bill Platko
says that depending on the amount of
time a billboard is rented, prices could
range from $8,000 to $10,000, or even
up to $30,000.

Reynolds says that although electronic boards are more expensive than most
traditional billboards, the flexibility
makes it worth the cost for Real Living
Realty One.

“The idea that we have the same message up for all that time is not as nearly
as exciting as being able to change it,”
she says. “It’s real time.”

“On the way to work, we could say,
‘Have a great day, go to realtyone.com.’
On the way home we can say, ‘Did you
go to realtyone.com today?’”