On a recent episode of the Power House podcast, HousingWire CEO Clayton Collins sat down with Mickey Neuberger, chief marketing officer at Realtor.com and the former vice president of global marketing at eBay.
In this tantalizing conversation, Collins and Neuberger survey the CMO’s path into marketing, his experience and approach to the field, brand presence, social media and Realtor.com’s recent buyer agency advocacy campaign.
The duo start the conversation by diving into Neuberger’s background and experience before his role at Realtor.com. Neuberger shares how he started his marketing career on the data and analytics side of the fence. Before that, he kicked off his career in computer science as a coder and software developer.
Neuberger’s first job as a coder started with a company that designed websites and applications for clients. The company often worked with clients in real estate and Neuberger’s interest in the field grew as he learned more about their marketing plights.
Fast forward a few years and Neuberger enrolled in the University of California at Berkeley’s MBA program, where he learned to “move the needle” for companies with data-driven marketing tactics. From there, his journey led into a role at eBay, where he helped to launch its longtime scaled marketing campaign, “Browse But Didn’t Buy.” That effort generated about $100 million in revenue for the company. Neuberger followed this momentum into other roles at eBay and eventually to the CMO position at Realtor.com.
Neuberger retraces his drive for real estate marketing back to his own home search in San Francisco. His experience working with a Realtor motivated him to shift into real estate and strive for results with his unique data-driven approach. Neuberger also made note of the similarities between his roles at eBay and Realtor.com.
“I saw that I could help because I understand how to drive results and big marketplaces, and I was attracted to the problem,” Neuberger said. “At eBay, you have a network of sellers and a B2B component just like [Realtor.com] where you have agents, brokers and teams.”
Collins asks Neuberger to explore his key objectives during his early days at Realtor.com. The CMO immediately mentions two considerations — building high user intent and a high-quality market audience, and rejuvenating the brand and audience to align with the company’s original mission.
The Realtor.com brand presented new opportunities in terms of brand trust, media relationships and syndication. According to Neuberger, Realtor.com “invented online real estate” and directed the industry toward a web-centered business model.
Having that previously established brand trust asserts Realtor.com as the top real estate platform on the web, Neuberger argues.
“We’re the No. 1 place the pros trust. You’d be crazy in this big financial transaction, the biggest in your life, the one with all this fear, to not use what the pros use,” he said.
Realtor.com is also partnering with several organizations to share its content, including Fox and News Corp, two platforms that offer more than 100 million users to Realtor.com’s audience.
After a brief exploration of content syndication and social media marketing, the conversation ends with a discussion surrounding Realtor.com’s buyer agency advocacy campaign, which lists 111 tasks that a buyer would have to tackle without an agent. The intention is for consumers to see the exhaustive list and realize the importance of using an agent.
The campaign also helps consumers of all financial and ethnic backgrounds with buying homes and building wealth. Buyer’s agents also benefit from receiving more clientele and government recognition.
