Should a local newsletter have a real estate section?

We throw a fancy house in every issue just because people like to click on fancy houses. It's always one of the top clicks. When we only featured the most expensive house on the market, it was almost always in the top three clicks of the whole newsletter.

"People love real estate, even though they signed up for local media. It's Zillow spying."

I don't make money from real estate. I run it anyway because readers love it. If you're a realtor, or you want to sell to realtors, it's the most valuable section you have.

What does the real estate section look like?

• Featured homes with a photo or a photo-tour GIF.
• Key details and a link to the listing.
• Optional: in a realtor's own newsletter, market info and a couple more listings.

On the website, each home gets a short article, and we're automating those with our software for SEO reasons. The graphics used to take my team at least 15 minutes per newsletter to build in Canva, across about 18 newsletters. A tool that stamps the address, price and photo onto a template made it basically instant.

Which homes should you feature?

We moved from one fancy house to three homes per issue, an idea we borrowed from another operator:

1. A starter home, the cheaper one.
2. A nice, normal home for an upper-middle-class buyer.
3. The most expensive home you can find. In two of my newsletters, that's always over $10 million, which is pretty fun.

Most people click the expensive one. But the other two get them used to seeing houses they could actually buy. If you only feature one, pick the fanciest available. You want people to go "whoa," because that's what brings them back.

The other format is one house shown as a GIF of five rotating photos with a short paragraph and the basics. A GIF of several photos is probably the better way to show a home. The downside is space: three full-size photos with descriptions means a lot of scrolling on a phone.

You don't need many listings. We need at most 10 to 12 homes a month per location, spread across the cheap, normal and high-priced ranges. Pulling every new listing every day is a waste.

These are the filters I set for a local newsletter's real estate feed:

• Homes already sold.
• Land for sale.
• An entire complex for sale.
• Rentals. That's the other big one.

Readers want to peek inside a house. A vacant lot or a whole apartment complex isn't that.

Change the homes every issue. If a realtor keeps putting the same houses in because they want to sell them, they're hurting the brand to help a side business.

Should you run it if nobody pays for it?

Yes. I told a new operator: if you don't have anybody paying for it, offer it to a realtor for free and put it in anyway. You want to train your audience to know this newsletter has a real estate section and has ads. It's always there. They get used to it. That's how you justify charging for it later.

For a realtor running their own newsletter, the same logic applies. Once readers are used to real estate being a big part of it, your own promo ("want to sell your house with no realtor fees in one day?") feels normal.

How do you make money from it, or trade it?

Start with the numbers. When you can tell a realtor "each listing we put in here gets 50 clicks every single week from people who live here," that's a strong pitch. In one of our Southern California newsletters, we won't let that slot go cheap. It's just too valuable for realtors.

You can also use it as a trading system. One realtor makes social media content for my brand for free, a video a day, because I let her put her homes in the section. She can go to her realtor network and say "I run the real estate section of the biggest local media company in town, want your house in there?"

"I'll let you own this channel. I'm paying to grow this thing. You get to piggyback off my brand and my investment for free to make content that's going to help you."

For a realtor, it's a digital billboard. People see you every single week. A few ways to package it:

• Own the section: their name and photo in every issue, as long as it's a different house every week.
• The website: the listing page shows the realtor's image, so when people search for that home, she's on it. It doesn't even have to be her listing. "Want a tour? Call her" still gets her the buyers.
• A brokerage version: feature only that brokerage's listings and link to its site instead of Zillow. I'm not sure how the commissions would work, but theoretically you could.
• Instagram: a realtor making content for your Instagram gives you another channel to sell ads in.

Once you're bigger, you can also offer a free spot to someone who helped you on a deal. It gives you space to trade.

How should a realtor mix real estate with local content?

Half local newsletter, half real estate. Market info, a couple of listings, local events, and one news story or one restaurant.

"If all you talk about is real estate, I'm not in the market, so why do I want to look at it? But with local events, now you have a reason to look at it even if you're not in the market."

The only thing I need from the realtor each week is a short personal editorial. Listings come in through a standing form where they drop links. Calls to action go near the top, in the middle and at the end.

Weekly is the smart cadence for a realtor newsletter. Less than weekly isn't common enough.

Full breakdown in what a realtor or small business should put in a newsletter.

Should real estate be its own newsletter?

Probably not yet. If you ask people to opt in to a separate real estate edition, you'll get a small number. Consider sending a once-a-month real estate version to everyone with a note at the top: not interested? Click here and we'll take you off. Beehiiv tags let you exclude just the people who say no. Nobody's going to unsubscribe over one email a month.

Don't start a whole new publication for it in a smaller market. You do that when you get into bigger locations. The same goes for sports: a small section in the main newsletter that links to a sports page on your website is enough.