If you’re a real estate agent who sends regular marketing pieces to your past clients, contacts, and/or a farm, you might be surprised to know what your potential future real estate clients are thinking about towards the end of the year. (I’m talking right now primarily about home buyers, but of course their mindset affects future sellers as well.)
Conventional wisdom has it that in December people are busy with holiday preparations and travel plans, and therefore probably aren’t likely to turn their minds to real estate until well into the New Year. But check out today’s graph (12/3/11) from Google Trends:
This shows the search activity in North America on Google for specific search terms related to home buying. As you can see from previous years, there’s always a dramatic jump in activity late in the year, but look at the volume so far this December! It’s interesting that the term “home buying” hasn’t followed the trend (yet, anyway).
So, should you concentrate on marketing to home buyers late in the year? In my opinion the answer is “yes,” since ultimately as real estate agents the goal is to provide people with useful information that will help them accomplish what they’re trying to do, and the graph tells us that right now there’s a surge of people thinking about buying homes. As always, just keep things in perspective, and remember that you’re marketing during a season that is focused on something far more important.
(Either way, the current graph implies that early January would be a great time to go all-out.)