Joel Davis,
Strategic Director at Image Property.
What Sunshine Coast Daily’s move to digital means for real estate?
After four decades in print in its modern form, it has just been announced that the Sunshine Coast Daily will move to a digital-only platform at the end of June.
The move was perhaps not surprising given the printed newspapers of old had become more and more financially unviable over the years.
Throw in the coronavirus and big corporations like News Corp have made the decision to drastically reduce the number of titles that they will physically print from now on.
The announcement is a sad day for our region, and for many others, where printed community newspapers have always been such an important part of our lives.
No doubt, in time, we will see some entrepreneurial soul create a new printed version to keep our community informed.
However, while the demise of the printed version of the Sunshine Coast Daily will be mourned by most of us, it will remain in digital format, which is where most of us have turned to for our news over the past decade.
In the same vein, the way that real estate is marketed has also changed significantly over the past four decades.
Back then, of course, real estate was a mainstay of all newspapers, with signboards in our offices another key way that we marketed our vendor’s properties for sale.
For the past decade or so, though, the predominant way for us to market properties has been online.
We have done so via a number of major listing sites, as well as our own websites and e-communication to our buyer and seller databases.
The move to online listings also enabled us to showcase each property more thoroughly with professional photography as well as video walk-throughs (which were vital during the lockdown) and even drone photography over recent times.
It is from these sites and e-marketing activities that we have connected with potential buyers, who then decide to attend an inspection of a property and hopefully become the successful purchaser.
So, the move to online real estate marketing is a normal part of real estate transactions these days.
While it is still early days in terms of the end of the printed era for our region’s newspaper, vendors will generally not see any change to the way that their properties are marketed for sale.
That is because technology enabled our society to continue to operate relatively seamlessly over recent months, with the buying and selling of real estate taking place without much interruption as well.
