Agents need to turn themselves into trusted experts on the economics of the property market to garner more media coverage to help build their brand, a leading News Corp Australia executive says.
Speaking as part of Elite Agent’s Zoomathon, a 30-plus hour online training session to raise money for Hands Across the Water, News Corp Queensland and Northern Territory Managing Director Jason Scott says the big data the media platform collects shows precisely what its audiences want to know.
“The killer insight is that the agents that turn themselves into a trusted expert on the economics of houses and suburbs will always find an audience,” he says.
Jason also shared some insights into what type of real estate stories readers of each publication prefer, with news.com.au readers drawn to lighter reads, such as celebrities selling their homes.
Alternatively, the subscriber masthead audience prefers more in-depth coverage about the market and where it’s headed.
“We’ve got about 16 million unique audiences across the News Corp network, and it gives us this really unique understanding of what Australians are interested in,” he says.
“We know what they click on, we know how long they stay, and we know what locked stories convince them to get their credit cards out and subscribe.
“So news.com.au is mostly celebrities and their houses. The masthead sites are more about the houses themselves and not who owns them.
“It’s more about suburb profiles, investment information and what your house is worth.”
The top stories
Jason says the top real estate stories on news.com.au in the past year included:
- Kylie Minogue sells Cambridge St, Armidale, house after 31 years
- Inside the home of the highest paid woman on YouTube Rosanna Pansino
- Karl Stefanovic takes ownership of humble North Shore property with three bedrooms
“The number one story on news.com.au for real estate in the past 12 months was Inside OnlyFans millionaire Jackson O’Doherty’s octagon housewarming,” Jason says.
“This story had 404,000 visits.”
But Jason says the paid masthead sites had a “distinctly different” audience who wanted to read more in-depth content.
He says some of the top articles on the paid sites in the past 12 months were:
- The best Melbourne suburbs to live in lockdown
- Flight to the ‘burbs opens up inner-city bargains
“If I’m an agent and I manage to get the listing to sell a celebrity home, I’m not going to have trouble finding an audience,” Jason explains.
“But, that’s quite rare.
“Think about it, particularly in your patch, our audience is telling us they’re looking for a trusted expert on the economics of property ownership in a particular patch.”
Jason also explains how News Corp has changed from a print business that solely targeted passive buyers to a multi-platform approach targeting all property buyers.
He says just like American outlaw Willie Sutton stole from banks because that’s where the money was, News Corp can use data points to target specific markets of buyers.
“We’ve got two billion data points from our sites, and then we match them with the buying behaviours of Mastercard and Flybuys to target the right buyers,” Jason says.
“If you’ve got a listing where you want to attract high net worth buyers… what we do is we match the consumption data, people looking for expensive houses, cars and watches on our site, with the transaction data.
“So if anyone buys an Aspen ski holiday on their Mastercard, that’s the audience we want, and we match that with our browsing behaviour to target.”
Jason says in more recent times, News Corp Australia has also started streaming live auctions on its sites with great success, and this presents another opportunity for agents to gain publicity and build their brand.
He says an action-packed auction with multiple buyers and a good auctioneer makes compelling viewing.
“The thing that interests me is engagement time,” he says.
“They’re not clicking on for two or three minutes, but 10, 12 and 13 minutes.
“Quality content is king.”
You can watch all the Zoomathon replays and other great content in the Elite Agent App.
