Here’s a really easy way to help REALTORS improve their understanding of marketing – or more accurately, why Generation X and Y aren’t responding at all to their marketing. No, it’s not another diatribe against listings on REALTOR.COM with no photos; nor is it a generic rant against newspapers. If you don’t get that those don’t work by now, we don’t have a prescription for you. But if you want to laugh alongside a Gen Xer like me, then let’s play a good old game of show-and-tell.

Which of the following direct-mail marketing pieces looks most like mailings you get from your local REALTOR:

This postcard from Weight Watchers:

Or this one, from Infiniti:

Hmmm…. Do you need a second to think about it? Probably not.

Why is it that REALTORS continue to promote their listings – commodities that sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars – with the same tools (and the same impact) as a Weight Watchers promotion from the local gym? Seems to me that the postcard is not only ineffective (how much information can it possibly contain?) but it’s simply cheesy. Makes you wonder just how many sellers are actually impressed when their home – their pride and joy, which they are hoping a buyer will purchase for a lot of money – is featured on a 40-cent marketing piece.

And to be clear, the Infiniti marketing piece in the photo above was actually as sixteen page brochure enticing me to pick another Infiniti when my lease is up in a few months. High quality paper, full-bleed color, and text descriptions that most listings online would die for – and I quote:

Engaging, illuminating, inspiring. The Infiniti M delivers a complete driving experience. Framed by its sleek silhouette, the M’s luxurious essence is found in an interior rich in refinement, abundant in space and supple to the touch…

Consider that the “description” on the “listing sheet” for a $55,000 car. Now here’s the description from a $1.5 million dollar listing on REALTOR.COM:

Well, well, well. The “description” enticing me to inquire on this house is a list of meaningless data.

Single Family Property, Area: San Francisco County, Subdivision: DOLORES PLAZA, Approximately 0.1 acre(s), Year Built: 1904, Garage, Central air conditioning, Basement, Laundry room.

Wow! It has a basement! And a laundry room! That’s so cool! I didn’t expect to get a laundry room with $1.5 million dollars. What a baaaaaagain, as we say in Boston!

How pathetic.

At least this listing sheet was online, where a bunch of photos were actually included. But even if a picture is worth a thousand words, do you think maybe the REALTOR could have spared a few words to at least tell me how exhilarated, enticed or at least happy I would be if I purchased this home? I mean, for $882 a square foot, don’t you think maybe a little story telling might be in order? Well, at least there’s a button for “printable brochure” – maybe that’s where the agent put in the really good marketing effort, I thought, so I pressed it, and here’s what I got (I have cropped the agent’s name and company/phone numbers because I’m a nice guy…):

Not exactly a sixteen page marketing brochure that excites the senses, would you say?

Just what kind of fantasy world do REALTORS still live in, to expect that a single-page of “facts and figures” with a couple of photos – one of which always has to be the agent’s high-school photo – is somehow going to “impress” buyers? Buyers don’t purchase homes because a particular room is 12 x 17 or has a “rug” or the roof is “shingled.” They buy homes because they appeal to their senses, their desires, their dreams. Where are the words describing dreams in the listing sheets today?

One pathetic, ink-jet printed page on recycled paper. That’s how most REALTORS market homes today. They take a buyer to see their listings and they leave them with a “printout” that’s not even glossy. This is marketing? This is how to sell a product that’s competing against lots of others in the marketplace, that the seller is asking hundreds of thousands of dollars from the buyer, that the agent will make a few thousand dollars commission themselves from the sale?

It’s insulting. It’s maddening. It’s ridiculous. No self-respecting Gen Y’er who stops by your open house after coming from a car dealership where they picked up a really cool, multi-page brochure describing their totally exciting, impressive, sexy new car is going to stop and say, “Wow! I gotta have this home!” Gen X sellers – if they list with the one-page-marketer-REALTOR – and who can put their own photos and video commercials online – aren’t going to be impressed by a pile of paper sitting on their table as an example of “your marketing efforts” for their home.

Even Baby Boomers are shaking their heads at the wimpy listing sheet. For years, they have been calling “Craftmatic Adjustable Beds for a free video tape” of a product that only costs a couple of thousand dollars. A video tape, sent by mail, to sell a bed. And REALTORS are still promoting homes on a single piece of paper? Pathetic.