As a solid baby-boomer, I have watched with amusement the media fascination with Generations X, Y, and Z, especially whether they will buy houses as their parents and grandparents did. Dire predictions of economic disaster for homeowners appear to be premature, based on the current recovery in home prices. To me, the bottom line is always the same: there are 317 million people in this country of ours, and most of them prefer to live indoors.
The most recent attempt at generational categorization has caught my attention, and if you have a home to sell you should take note as well.
Our friends at Google have defined Gen C not so much by its age as by its members' actions and interests. They prefer to think of Gen C as a culture: "People who care deeply about creation, curation, connection, and community. It's not an age group; it's an attitude and mindset."
(Editor's note: I had to look up "curation." I thought it meant making pork into ham, but it turns out to be "the cataloging and indexing of meaningful digital information." My guess is that Realtors of the future will change their name to curators.)
Why is this important to anyone trying to market real estate? Because the folks at Google are pretty smart. Remember, they have, with all due respect to MicroSoft and Apple, for the most part managed to take over the digital world. (In the interest of full disclosure, I own no stock in Google, Inc., but wish I did.) And those folks at Google have given Gen C a subtitle: "The YouTube Generation."
According to Google, here are some defining characteristics of Gen C:
* Fully 80 percent are also a part of Gen Y, born between the early 1980s and early 2000s, YouTube’s core audience.
* Gen C'ers control $500 billion a year in spending power in the U.S. "Decision-making is a team sport," with 85 per cent relying on peer approvals for buying decisions.
* YouTube is a major source of information and social interaction. I was stunned to learn that the number two search engine in the world is not Bing or Yahoo, but YouTube. It’s because there is now a video on almost every topic in the world.
* Gen C'ers eat, sleep and breathe the Internet, across many devices. Here is the defining stat: 91 per cent of this group sleeps next to a smartphone.
* Gen C relies on YouTube on all screens, especially mobile devices, and in particular, cellphones. I got a new smartphone the other day. I was amazed to sit there and watch a beautiful video of a home tour while driving around the Perimeter. And the quality was remarkable. Add in falling prices for data plans and rising network speeds, and we find that mobile video is exploding.
So what does all this mean if you are trying to sell a house?
It all boils down to buyer behavior. Buyers want video, and for the most part, sellers and agents aren't giving it to them.
As I have reminded you before, fully 88 percent of buyers begin their search for their next home on the Internet.
The bottom line here is that the eyeballs you want to grab are already focused on the Internet, and those most likely to buy a house are already focused squarely on YouTube. If you aren’t creating some form of video content to market your real estate, you are missing a huge opportunity to beat your competition.
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