Review From the Road Part II: Advertising and Appraisals

It’s been a while since I posted an update from the field. We continue to meet with lots and lots of people across the industry. Lenders and banks have been very keen to work with us to find ways to get in front of our audience.  

People are often skeptical about how advertising can sustain us. And while I can’t say we’re where we want to be quite yet, I can tell you that we remain very bullish on this model. Our ad revenues continue to grow, and better yet, our core advertisers continue to renew and spend more with us. We recently launched a “See homes for Sale” ad unit which has been well-received.

We also continue to get questions about whether our goal is to eliminate real estate agents and/or appraisers. The answer is no. Not even close. We think agents and appraisers will always be a critical part of real estate transactions. We view ourselves as a media company. As such, our goal is to create an audience of people who are interested in real estate. We’ll do this by developing tools and information and offering this to consumers for free so that, when they do meet with a real estate professional, they will be more informed and educated about this complex process. Achieving this goal is not only great for our consumers; it’s great for all of our advertising partners.