What you need to know 

• REA Group has hit the market with a big brand campaign that doubles down on realestate.com.au’s “number 1” position ahead of the Spring selling season – and it’s batting back any suggestions that its biggest rival is playing catch up.
• Created in partnership with 72andSunny, the new work premiered on Saturday evening during Nine’s Day 1 Paris Olympics coverage.
• The strategy is ultimately one of scale: storytelling comes first in a big brand spot that hones in on the buyer-seller moment, with product-specific iterations to roll out as the campaign progresses. GM of audience and marketing, Sarah Myers, says the rental moment will also get its turn in the spotlight later on – and they’ll be plenty of time for it, with the campaign timeline to flex to the six-month mark pending market conditions. 
• As a two-sided marketplace, Myers says products like realEstimate make for a customer experiences that “rusts on” audiences and customers alike. The more that use REA’s tools, the better their data, and more accurate their insights – and so the cycle continues.

As other sectors hold out for the economy to turn the corner, the Australian property market is “actually really quite healthy”, according REA Group’s general manager of audience and marketing, Sarah Myers. She’s drawing on close to a decade of category experience, having joined the majority News Corp-owned digital property platform after a four year stint at its biggest rival – Domain. 

Almost five years post-switch, Myers leads a team of over 50 marketing professionals across brand, performance, lifecycle, audience and personalisation and insights and analytics, with a remit that encompasses REA’s core consumer brands, realestate.com.au, realcommercial.com.au, Mortgage Choice and Flatmates.

“The property market in Australia in particular is incredibly cyclical, but what we’re seeing is that consumer confidence remains really resilient,” she tells Mi3 of the state of play, ahead of REA’s latest big brand investment. It’s no huge surprise, given that property prices have continued to track upwards at unprecedented rates, last month hitting record highs in Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth metro markets, per PropTrack’s Home Price Index.

What’s more interesting is that buyer demand remains high despite the pressures of inflation and high interest rates – and Myers says that demand has been particularly strong since the latter plateaued in the back half of last year. It’s good news for REA, which is a beneficiary of what PropTrack reports was a national uptick of 7.3 per cent in new listings for June compared to the year prior (though listings were down 3.5% month-on-month)– and they’re being snapped up almost as quickly as they’re added to the market.

Now, the business is looking to build on the momentum with a new brand strategy and creative platform for realestate.com.au that Myers hopes will motivate buyers, sellers and renters to ‘Keep Moving’ towards their next home.

The work lands ahead of the critical spring property season, and is conveniently timed to coincide with the Paris Olympics, premiering during Nine’s coverage on Saturday night. Per Myers, it’s the “perfect environment” to launch the new platform – and a total reach of 5.4 million national viewers on day one of the event broadcast backs that up.

“The Olympics is such a big cultural event, and in addition to the huge reach and attention that an event like the Olympics can deliver, it’s such a premium environment, and that’s really where category leading brands show up.”

Leaning into category leadership

REA recruited creative agency 72andSunny to develop a new piece of work that would build on realestate.com.au’s ongoing positioning, ‘Australia’s number 1 address in property’.

The brand is not shy about its position in market, and nor is Myers. She explains that for the large part, it’s a numbers game, and with realestate.com.au reaching 10.8 million monthly uniques (versus Domain’s 7.4 million) they can funnel their data and insights right back into the customer experience.

“The strategy of the campaign really is to convey that as a category leader, our scale gives us unrivalled data and insights, and that as the market is changing, that we put that data back in the hands of our consumers so that they can have confidence to navigate that market,” says Myers.

Domain’s chief marketer, Rebecca Darley, spoke to Mi3 earlier in the year to contest that position. While realestate.com.au has the scale, Darley said its counterpart at Nine Entertainment is closing the gap with total audience growth of 10.3 per cent against 5 per cent overall category results recorded by Ipsos – a feat she attributed to “personalisation at scale” and the power market mix modelling.

But Myers is strong in her convictions that REA still leads “on every measure and metric”.

“Our audience position and our brand position has actually never been stronger. We’re a clear market leader in every single market and across every platform – web, mobile, rent, sell, whether you look at listings, whether you look at audience, it’s absolutely unrivalled,” she tells Mi3.

Realestate.com.au has lifted its unique audience by over a million in the last 12 months and its app receives over 50 million visits every month – five times its nearest rival, per Myers. She also points to the 5 million consumers who exclusively use realestate.com.au because “they don’t see that there is any other option”, and the four to five times longer dwell time in app, versus its key competitor.

“We’re really incredibly focused on giving great value to our customers [agents and sellers], and we’ve got such a big pipeline of innovation ahead… When they’re putting a listing on our site, they know that they’re reaching this significantly larger audience with much deeper levels of engagement, and that leads to higher inquiries.”

Going for scale

With realestate.com.au’s lead on audience the foundation to its positioning, REA is tapping scale in more ways than one in its latest campaign.

An unconstrained run in an extensive list of media channels – executions will appear across TV, BVOD, YouTube, OOH, cinema, radio, digital display, digital audio and social courtesy of indie media shop Kaimera – suggests there’s ample budget to ensure the campaign reaches the right eyeballs. REA will adapt the campaign according to market conditions, but per Myers the plan for now is to build on core brand message with product and vertical-specific spots over the next six months.

Catering to the consumer end of what is a two-sided property marketplace (with agent and seller ‘customers’ sitting at the other end), the ‘Keep Moving’ hero film sees a family of four tackle the property journey from the comfort of their couch, which zips between neighbourhood property viewings and a front yard auction before landing them in the living room of their new home. It’s a kooky visual set to the uplifting sounds of the Eurogliders track ‘Heaven’ – aligning with REA’s ongoing efforts to feature Australian music and work with Australian talent in its advertising, per Myers.

With close to a decade in the property listing space, Myers reckons the creative is “refreshing” for the category. “We wanted to make sure that the creatives that we brought to market felt really authentic to the current market – I think that you’ll feel that in the spot.”

There’s thirty and fifteen second cutdowns to the minute long spot, directed by Finch’s Nick Ball, and Myers indicates that customer experience will come more directly into the fore in future campaign iterations that will hero realestate.com.au’s ‘realEstimate’ and Mortgage Choice tools. 

For now, the campaign will focus on the “buyer-seller” moment, but Myers says it will get the rental market in later iterations, with the the strategy being to connect with consumers wherever they are in the property buying journey.

“It might be that you’re starting to think about selling, and so getting a realEstimate of your property helps you understand what that valuation is like. That’s your next step. For someone that’s thinking about buying, connecting them with a mortgage choice broker [is] their next step so they can understand what their borrowing power would be. But for a renter, it’s highlighting the fact that they can create a renter profile and instantly apply for a property with us that makes that process easier in a challenging [rental market].”

“It’s about leveraging our product features as well as the volume of listings. We’ve got more listings than anyone else in the market, and at the end of the day, that that makes the process much easier for consumers,” she adds.

Customer experience at the core

It’s those products that Myers says feeds both the consumer and the customer experience within REA’s platforms – and it all comes down to data.

One in three Australians track the value of their property through the company’s realEstimate tool, and those data points are worked back into the system to improve the accuracy of those estimates. Myers explains it’s also helping agents to have better engagement with vendors who are coming to conversations better equipped with information.

“[realEstimate] is what is pulling consumers back. Time and time again, they come back every month to see what their property value has changed to and how that’s changing,” she says. “Experiences like that are rusting on our audience over our nearest competitor.”

Now, REA is building on that ecosystem with another consumer feature that will drop in the later stages of the ‘Keep Moving’ campaign – though Myers is for now tight lipped on what that might look like.

As for how success will be measured, Myers is keeping it simple: “we will be focusing on driving awareness, preference, as well as brand trust, we believe brand trust is a key measure of success”. Unique audience will continue to be a key metric too, and she’ll be working to keep widening the gap with rivals to hold onto that category leader crown.