Florida Real Estate Ads Leave Papers For the Web

It’s bad enough that the tanking Florida housing market is leading to a slump in real estate advertising at newspapers, as a series of grim earnings reports showed last week.

What’s worse is that a lot of that advertising may never come back to newspapers when and if the Florida real estate sector recovers.

That’s because a significant chunk of those advertising dollars are moving — you guessed it, online.

Several real estate executives say they are making a conscious decision to move money out of newspapers and onto the Internet as that medium grows as a tool for Florida home loan seekers’ in researching home buying decisions.

Granted, a significant amount of the declines in real estate advertising in newspapers can be attributed to the general weakness in real estate, in hard hit markets such as California and Florida, especially.

Hard to believe as it is right now, the market was teeming with Florida mortgage seekers as little as a year and a half ago.

What’s worrying analysts this time around is that real estate could become the next category of classified advertising — after help-wanted ads — to mark a significant and permanent shift away onto the Internet.

The stakes are big for newspapers since classifieds are highly lucrative and make up more than 35 percent of their revenues.

From Florida mortgage broker and lender groups to builders and agents, the fallout from the housing slump continues to trickle down.

SOURCE: Associated Press