Papers Losing Real Estate Ads to Online

Real estate advertisements are shown in Newsday, Friday, July 27, 2007 in New York. Whenever the housing market does recover, don't look for real estate ads to bounce back entirely in newspapers. That's because a good amount of that advertising may be gone for good, you guessed it, online. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan) (Mark Lennihan - AP)

"Is newspaper a high priority? No," Antal said. "I don't believe my buyers and sellers are going to be in that market."

Newspaper publishers understand they need to move more aggressively to hold on to real estate advertising. "We can't sit on our hands," says Charlie Diederich, the director of marketing and advertising at the Newspaper Association of America, an industry group.

Diederich said newspapers are still a key part of most people's real estate searches and an important tool for realtors to make people aware of their brands. But he also acknowledged that newspapers need to do more to make their own Web sites essential to home buying decisions.

"We've got to improve both our print but especially our online products ... so consumers will continue to come to us first so we can deliver that audience to the professional realtor," Diederich said.

A group of five major newspaper publishers also owns Classified Ventures, a Chicago-based business that powers the real estate sections of the Web sites of its 125 member newspapers.

Tim Fagan, president of that group's real estate division, said Classified Ventures would "significantly increase" its investment in Homescape, a real estate-related Web site that provides home listings, but he declined to provide specific numbers.

Whether those efforts will be enough to stanch the flow of real estate ad dollars to online alternatives remains to be seen.

Blanche Evans, the editor of Realty Times, an online real estate news service, says that realtors now have a number of alternatives besides newspapers for listing homes for sale, such as http://www.Realtor.com, a site run by the National Association of Realtors, in addition to major online destinations such as Yahoo Inc.

As home-buyers flock online, it's also tough on realtors, Evans said, since home-buyers are becoming accustomed to seeing extensive color photos, descriptions of the neighborhood as well as video tours of the property _ all of which costs money to produce.

With all the online tools available today, realtors "have the ability now to really expose the property in a significant way," Evans said. "People have the ability to tour the house. That has changed everything."