Real estate developers boost interest with webisodes

If you think real estate ads have to be traditional listings and boring pictures, think again. Real estate developers in Canada are hoping a few "Sex & The City" type ads will create a bigger buzz for their new development in Vancouver.

by Kristina Knight

Called "Donovan Life", the project has garnered some interest from potential tenants and from the advertising world, and it isn't the first such offering. The Dove soap brand hired "Desperate Housewives" star Felicity Huffman to star in webisodes last year with some success. In the ads, Huffman was transported back into classic sitcoms. For real estate, however, this is a fairly new idea and one worth taking note of.

Garry Benson, chief executive of Garrison Partners, a national real estate marketing company based in Chicago said (via the Chicago Tribune), "Historically, a third of our traffic is going to come from traditional media such as newspapers, a third from signage and a third is from other forms of outreach, such as the Internet."

Learning how to draw potential buyers in from Internet advertising has been difficult because other than displaying static pictures on websites and describing the property, there is little a real estate broker can do. By using webisodes, developers can show real people in a real space, interacting. It is a kind of slice of life advertisement.