Tuesday, August 30, 2005
Newspapers benefit from real estate bubble
According to this WSJ story (subscription required), newspapers are among the associated sectors that are handily benefiting from the real estate bubble thanks to a growing share of the shrinking offline classifieds market:
Real-estate ads accounted for about one-fourth of the $16.6 billion in classified-ad revenue collected by newspapers last year, according to the Newspaper Association of America. That represents a growing share of a shrinking market in general. Total classified-ad revenue was $19.6 billion in 2000, with real-estate ads making up 16%.
But online real-estate sites are steadily gaining a bigger slice of the business. Online sites captured an estimated 11% of the $12 billion real-estate ad market last year, according to the Realtors' association, with big players like Yahoo Inc. and Google Inc. making major moves into the segment. This year's online real-estate ad sales will total about $1.8 billion, or about 15.7% of the total, Borrell estimates. Most of these online ads are placed by real-estate brokers, not individual sellers, the Realtors' group says.
