International Marketing Hoopla

There is a lot of "fluff" in the real estate sales business. Our industry has many participants because of the relatively low barriers to entry. As a result, Realtors and Brokers are always trying to differentiate themselves from the pack. One way we try to do this is through our strategies to market and sell your home.

If you have ever sold a home then you may have had to listen to a few Realtor marketing plans. They range from just sticking a sign in the yard all of the way to an elaborate overkill strategy that might include placing home for sale classified ads in the Bangladesh section of Craigslist.org.

One angle used by many Realtors is the marketing of your home internationally. Some real estate brokers have affiliates or relationships with agents around the world and claim that those relationships will help sell your home. It sounds sexy to think that a buyer in some far off, exotic location will fall in love with your home, but is that realistic? 

What are the chances that:

• Someone will walk into an affiliate real estate office in Madrid see a brochure for a home on Siesta Key displayed in their window and then come buy it?
• Someone in a foreign country sees a generic print ad from a real estate firm promoting the international reach; the person then jumps on their computer to visit the website in the ad; then miraculously clicks on a tiny footer link and eventually weaves their way through the web to somehow end up on a website displaying Sarasota properties?
• A Realtor in an affiliate office in Hong Kong happens to have a client that wants to buy a property on Longboat Key and then makes a connection with the local office?

I'd say the chances are pretty low.

Where Do Buyers Come From?

This website (LuxurySarasotaRealEstate.com) is one of the busier real estate sites in Sarasota. It is a pretty good barometer of where buyers originate. I am sure other local real estate sites would have similar traffic patterns. Below is a map showing where buyers come from. Dark green means lots of activity, light green means less activity. Naturally, most of the people searching for real estate in the Sarasota are coming from the United States. 

As you can see above, web visitors from the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom make up almost 96% of the total traffic. This makes a lot of sense to me as I have been working with international buyers for many years and most of them are from Canada and England.

International Property Owners

We have some great software that allows us to query the Sarasota property records easily. I ran a search for homeowners on Longboat Key, Siesta Key, Downtown Sarasota, Lido Key, Bird Key and West of the Trail who purchased after 2009 (arbitrary date). Out of 7,333 properties, here is where the out-of-country owners lived:

• Canada - 231
• United Kingdom - 53
• Germany - 9
• Scotland - 6
  
• Switzerland - 5
  
• France - 4
• Belgium - 4
• Austria - 3
• Ireland - 2
• Italy - 2
• Netherlands - 2
• Norway - 2
• China (Hong Kong) - 2
• Sweden - 2
• Luxembourg - 1
• Monaco - 1
• Poland - 1
• Turkey - 1
• Channel Islands - 1
• Czech Republic - 1
• Cayman Islands - 1
• British Virgin Islands - 1
• Iceland - 1

There is a total of 336 owners whose primary address is outside of the United States, which only represents about 4.6% of the market. 

What Does All of This Mean?

I think it is pretty clear by looking at website traffic patterns and the property tax records that most buyers for Sarasota real estate come from within the U.S., Canada and the United Kingdom. So when you meet with a Realtor about selling your home and they brag about all of their international marketing efforts, you should now know that most of that is just "fluff." The chances of them finding a buyer from Dubai are substantially less than finding one from Cleveland, Ohio.