Back in 1998, the executive director of the technological company Cisco Systems stated “the internet is going to alter the way people live, work, play and learn...It is going to have the same impact on the society as the industrial revolution“. Twenty years later, we are witnessing various changes that have occurred due to the impact of development of, as many call it, the most democratic medium in history.
The name “internet” is a combination of the words - international and net. This is a medium that has enabled faster communication among individuals nearly eliminating space and time limitations providing us with multimedia content exchange. Research has shown that the number of hours users spend online increases each year along with the value of technological companies closely tied to the internet revolution. According to the market value criteria, Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook and Amazon are among the top 10 most successful American companies.
Internet has also had an impact on the real estate transactions because it has changed the method of communication between agencies and their clients. In addition to the internet medium decreasing the costs, speeding up and simplifying the overall process of buying and selling real estate, it is also a communication instrument that provides many possibilities in terms of advertising.
Agency web pages provide the users with the necessary information about the agencies themselves, access to key data regarding offered real estates, photographs and video clips, clients' comments and direct contacts. In addition to the web page, it is also important to communication with potential clients via the social media, such as Facebook, Twitter or Squidoo. This way, a certain message can be sent to potential clients via various media thereby increasing the advertising scope. You have to keep in mind that the advertisements have to be adjusted to each individual medium. Therefore, a text used for a Facebook advertisement needs to be written using a different style compared to those on the web page. Advertising efficiency can be enhanced by publishing virtual real estate tours on YouTube as statistical indicators state that YouTube contents are viewed three billion times every day. Furthermore, according to bizit.hr, Facebook video posts have a reach that is 135 percent greater than textual posts.
Certain experts claim that searching the online content via links, scrolling and screening text contribute to the loss of concentration and weaken the human critical thinking ability. Because of this, online advertising, even more than other media, must abide by the so-called Schoenfeld's formula 30 – 3- 30. The formula points to the importance of effective creation of the advertising message since those who receive the message are, as a general rule, divided into three groups: the first group are those who give the sender of the message only 30 seconds of attention to relay the message, the second are those who give him three minutes of attention and the third group are those who give him 30 minutes of attention. In the online environment, you also have to take into consideration that the user most often needs less than 10 seconds to decide whether he/she wants to continue searching a certain web page. Therefore, it is important for the advertisement to be formed to grab the user's attention.
In light of this, you need to know the best place on the web page where the user will notice the advertisement first. The upper left corner of a web page gets the most attention. It is also advisable to place an advertisement within a text or above it, but below the navigation bar.
However, for a potential client to even have a chance to see an advertisement for a specific real estate on some web page, the web page needs to be optimised for search engines, such as Google or Yahoo. Optimisation refers to undertaking activities so that a certain web page is displayed among the first results when searching for a specific term. According to medialift.hr, the importance of this is presented by the information stating that 75 percent of users never search the second page of results. Therefore, the internet opens up many possibilities in terms of advertising, free advertising, that also must be utilised in the field of real estate transactions thereby improving operations for the mutual benefits of agencies and their clients.
