Prior to 2007, Nextdoor was merely a private social network. Once you signed up, you belonged to a neighborhood and could see and speak with nearby users.
Today, Nextdoor has quickly grown into one of the largest social networks in the US, with more than 10 million users registered across over 100,000 neighborhoods!
And now, the social app has become a vital tool for real estate businesses.
What Exactly Is Nextdoor?
This social media phenomenon offers ways to foster relationships with your neighbors without having to go knock on doors. Nextdoor gives you the ability to start discussions and highlight important issues in your community. More specifically, people use the app to:
- Organize Neighborhood Watch Groups
- Get the word out about break-ins
- Find service providers
- Find new properties
The site even sports a house-by-house map of neighbors who are signed up.
(Not as creepy as it sounds, I assure you)
So, what does this have to do with the real estate industry?
After raising over $200 million in venture funding, the network has figured out how to make money through real estate ads. There’s no denying that this is an incredibly unique way for real estate businesses to build a relationship with their dedicated neighborhoods.
It’s brand building at its finest. It’s also the chance to consistently represent your brand on an emerging and popular platform. After all, the presentation of brands with consistency leads to a revenue increase of 23%.
Building a relationship with the neighborhoods you serve can certainly prove to be an effective way to present your real estate brand. According to research presented by Borrell Associates, the real estate industry spent more than $26 billion on advertising in 2016 alone, making it the largest local advertising category. So if you’re not pursuing all forms of advertising, you won’t be able to keep up.
Thankfully, utilizing Nextdoor to advertise your business is easy and powerful. Agents and brokers can create official business pages on the platform to build their reputation as local experts. You can even pay to sponsor a neighborhood section and purchase branded listings so that your profile shows up alongside your listings when someone looks for properties in the area.
While the platform may not have originally set out with the purpose of serving the real estate industry, it did make the effort to observe which industries were creating more profiles than others, and Real estate offices took the number one spot.
How Can Nextdoor Elevate Your Real Estate Business?
Nextdoor has been hard at work rolling out its real estate listings feature, which showcases properties for sale in local neighborhoods. And, it’s not just for people looking to buy property; it also aims to help users keep abreast of the changing real estate prices in their community.
Agents who have used Nextdoor to date wax poetic about its potential, brimming with excitement about all of the possibilities that it offers.
What’s more, getting started with Nextdoor is simple, requiring very little time and even less effort. So, let’s look at what you have to do to set up your business page:
- Head over to https://nextdoor.com/business
- Select the Business option
- Type in your business name and address
- Find your business on the list and click Claim
- Use a separate email to establish your business
- Verify your business via your phone
One agent, for example, set up their own neighborhood in Colorado quite easily. In his experience, he found that “Nextdoor presents a very real opportunity to engage with [an agent’s] target audience: homeowners.” He goes on to detail how Nextdoor makes it all pretty easy to connect with neighbors and invite new ones to join. It even handles the printing, mailing, and cost of postcards when reaching out to these potential clients/neighbors.
This particular agent got a couple of neighbors to sign up and then had 100 postcards emailed out.
While there aren’t many quantifiable stats available just yet, with the sheer power of networking, conversations, and all of the sharing that takes place on the site, the potential for business growth for agents via Nextdoor is humongous.
That’s it!
Is It Time For You to List Using Nextdoor?
Nextdoor’s rapid growth and massive potential is unwavering. Real estate professionals need to stay up to date with the latest tools and trends, which means if you’re not on Nextdoor, you’re missing out big time. However, if you join now, you’ll get a leg up on the competition as the platform continues to grow. It’s a whole new and exciting way to connect with clients and bring even greater success to your business.
So what are you waiting for? Take the first step towards additional success and “become the agent that neighbors think of first” with Nextdoor.