Pretoria-based real estate franchise is reaping the rewards of joining the proptech revolution, seeing an increase of 30% in the volume of enquiries received from targeted and engaged buyers and sellers who have seen their ads on their social media platforms, thanks to property performance marketing tool, FlowFuel. Of those enquiries driven by targeted social media ads, the franchise has seen 50% translate directly to viewings, with multiple deals currently in progress.
The Flow platform comprises two elements – FlowFuel and FlowBrand. The former pulls in agents’ listings and automatically converts them to Facebook and LinkedIn ads, targeted to the right audience, to drive new leads – trumping traditional online property portals with social media savvy. The latter helps cost-effectively and efficiently promote agents’ and agencies’ brand and profile to potential clients – finding those who are looking to buy or sell properties, when and where they are looking, on their social media platforms.
Brand awareness remains critical for agents in the property space – hard-won but often difficult to measure. ‘Reach’ is an online metric that demonstrates how many people have seen and recognised the brand consistently over the past few days – something impossible to measure with a billboard. RealNet RainMaker’s reach in their operating area of Pretoria East has been measured at 70% – meaning that over 112 000 people in their target area have seen their brand, an average 4 times, over the past 30 days.
FlowFuel has proven particularly useful in boosting sales and presence for top RealNet RainMaker Sales Executive Welma Deysel. The vastly experienced agent had to build her profile in a new area and harnessing FlowBrand’s ability to increase her reach and recall has given her an instant, beneficial presence in the space. “It takes years to build a reputation, but I’ve been able to bring my experience to bear in a whole new area and build a brand much faster and more cost-effectively than I would have thought,” she says.
Gerhard Kotze, MD of the RealNet estate agency group and Principal of RealNet’s new RainMaker business platform, says that the adoption of performance property marketing has exponentially expanded the efficiency of their limited marketing resources and driven unprecedented reach and returns. “We have such limited marketing resources and the market is so fragmented – but FlowFuel has really focused and consolidated our online reach and we’ve seen tangible, measurable results that are showing on our bottom line and making the agents’ job, easier,” he says.
Flow platform Co-Founders & Co-CEO’s Gil Sperling and Daniel Levy are no strangers to the performance marketing space, having built the continent’s largest and most successful adtech marketing company, Popimedia. Popimedia were the largest buyers of Facebook media inventory in Africa, representing some of the world’s biggest brands, when the company was acquired by global communications group Publicis in 2016. “The results that RealNet RainMaker and their agents are seeing are signs of the proptech revolution taking shape,” says Sperling. “Proptech removes the challenges posed by fragmented markets and access to limited resources, targeting potential customers and building agents’ vital reputations as experts in their areas with laser focus on the platforms their customers visit and linger over every day, on social media”.
