After a lean patch in 2016, Dubai Real estate industry is coming back on its track again. Dubai is a lucrative market for real estate investors. According to the Deloitte’s Middle East Predictions for Dubai in 2017 report, the demand for real estate properties will continue to rise. This includes both commercial and residential real estate properties. How can new players entering the Dubai real estate market benefit from the improving economic conditions? For that, they have to take advantage of digital technology and ride on digital marketing trends to give some tough competition to more established players in the industry. Here are five real estate digital marketing trends to ride on.

• Virtual Home Tours

Physical site tours have gone out of fashion lately and virtual reality and 3D technology has a lot to do with it. Now, you can go on a tour without leaving your room and that too as many times, as you want. For a real estate business in Dubai, this is a godsend, as they do not have to waste their time on arranging physical property tours for non-serious buyers.

On the other hand, serious buyers who are interested in purchasing your real estate can have an in depth look without leaving the comforts of their rooms. With cheaper VR headset already flooding the market and advancement in 3D technology, we will see an exponential rise in virtual tours in years to come. If you have not seen 3D real estate listing yet, you are missing something brilliant but do not worry, you will surely come across 3D real estate listings in coming months.

• Facebook Ads Is Not an Option Anymore

According to the statistics, Facebook has more than 2 billion monthly users and 1.32 billion among them use it daily. This makes it a great platform for advertising your real estate business. You never know most of your perspective customers might be active on Facebook. This makes Facebook ad spending more than justified. In fact, investing in social media ads is no longer an option anymore; it is the need of the day. If you are not investing in it, you are missing a lot of business. You can only reap the benefits of Facebook Ads when you optimize it for the best conversion performance and attracting to your target audience.

• Marketing Automation Will Take Over

Responding to every user queries and following up on hundreds of leads can be quite challenging. Why not put automation to work and offload some of your burden so you can focus on revenue generating activities. Are you still skeptical about using marketing automation? Here are some statistics about marketing automation that will convince you to use it and automate your marketing efforts to achieve better results.  The biggest advantage of using marketing automation is that it will nurture your leads and help you to convert those leads into paying customers with minimal effort.

• Video Is the New Medium

Real estate businesses in Dubai will harness the power of video and make an impact on their prospects because our brains process visual information much faster than textual information. It allows your property buyers to interact in a different way and spend more time on your website while seeing your real estate properties. You can give them a better look with a well-made video. As they say, “A picture is worth a thousand words and a video is worth a million words.” Do not be surprised to see Dubai real estate businesses using video as their preferred medium to display their products and tell customers about their service. It will happening but will soon go mainstream.

• Go Mobile or Go Home

With mobile internet users surpassing desktop internet users and Google penalizing non-mobile friendly websites, you do not have any other option than to get a mobile friendly website. Just like Facebook ad investment, having a responsive website for your real estate business is not an option anymore. You need it to survive in today’s mobile dominant world.  Even though, real estate was slow to adopt this trend but it is quickly gaining momentum with a major chunk of real estate visits coming from mobile devices. With so many mobile devices with different screen sizes, your real estate website should look and function properly on every device. That is where a responsive website can help you.

Conclusion

Having a dedicated website or an active blog is no longer a discussion point because things have moved way beyond that. Today, you will have to engage your prospects with virtual tours and video content. Invest in Facebook ads to show your properties to relevant audience. Use marketing automation to your advantage to focus better on revenue generating activities. If you know about any other real estate digital marketing trend that will transform Dubai real estate industry, feel free to share it with us in comments section below.