According to the NAR's most recent study, the Internet has caught up with newspapers, which lost market share, as a preferred method of searching for homes by homebuyers.

Forty-one percent of homebuyers used the Internet as an information source, neck and neck with newspapers for the first time in history. Eight percent of homebuyers first learned about the home they purchased using the Internet, while seven percent found the home they purchased through newspapers.

But don't count newspapers out yet. Once the dominant source of home-sale listings, newspapers may have lost audience share to the Internet, but their Web sites are catering to a valuable consumer segment of younger, upscale, first-time homebuyers, according to a new study.

“Real Estate Classifieds: Big Changes Ahead for the Home Listings Business, Part II” by Borrell Associates Inc. details the results of surveys of 3,914 online home seekers.

The report indicates that newspaper Web sites have captured home seekers who are two years younger than the national median, have a median household income that is 55 percent higher, and are generally not newspaper subscribers. It also found that a remarkable 57 percent of homebuyers on these sites were renters seeking to buy their first home.

“The amazing thing,” said Mike Donatello, vice president of research for Borrell Associates, “is that this mature industry has been successful in building a bridge between its older, more settled audience of newspaper readers and the younger crowd that prefers TV or the Net.”

Donatello said newspapers have been making the transition by combining listings and other real estate content with the types of “soft” things that home seekers say they want most from a Web site – credibility, accuracy and trustworthiness.

“These attributes comprised three of the top five most-valued features,” Donatello said. “Past research has shown that consumers give high marks in these areas to advertising in traditional, print newspapers. So, the newspaper brand appears to be an important factor in helping newspapers reach that non-print audience.”

The most recent release is the second half of Borrell’s two-part report focusing on online real estate advertising. The reports describe a “triple threat” to newspaper classifieds of shifting consumer home-seeking habits, a new policy allowing Realtors to publish home listings online, and stewing anti-newspaper sentiment as the catalysts. The new policy, known as “IDX” or “broker reciprocity,” took effect on Jan. 1, 2002, and is squarely positioning brokers as competitors with classified ad publishers, the report says.

Among other findings in the latest release:

Web sites operated by brokers and individual agents are most popular with consumers, but only because of their sheer numbers (more than 300,000, according to the report) and the aggressiveness of many real estate professionals in listing themselves in search engines. This information dovetails nicely with NAR's report that real estate agent sites rank third as most used by consumers in home searches behind Realtor.com and real estate company Web sites.
• Comprehensive, updated listings are important to consumers. Sites that offer MLS listings generate up to 30 times the number of unique visitors. The NAR says detailed property information is the number one most valued online feature for online homebuyers.
• The need for an agent is not diminished by the Internet. Eighty-six percent of the respondents said they were considering using a Realtor to complete their purchase. This also corresponds with NAR's report that 70 percent of homebuyers used the services of a broker or agent overall. Seventy-seven percent of Internet buyers bought a home using the services of an agent, while only 64 percent of traditional buyers did so.

Editor's note: The Newspaper Association of America has purchased distribution rights to the report for its membership. The survey is sponsored in part by InsightExpress, LLC, a provider of online research tools, and by CityXpress Corp., which offers online real estate content. For more information, contact www.borrellassociates.com, or gborrell@borrellassociates.com.