Realogy’s Karim Amadeo has been promoted to Manager, Multicultural & Growth Market at Realogy Holdings and CENTURY 21. We touched base to learn more about her new position and Realogy’s multicultural marketing strategy.
Karim Amadeo, a Portada Council System member, has recently been promoted from Manager, Hispanic National Hispanic Advertising, Century 21 Real Estate to Manager, Multicultural & Growth Market at Realogy and Century 21. We wanted to know more about this new position, so we sat down with Amadeo to ask her a few questions about this new role and Realogy’s multicultural marketing strategy overall.
Realogy is a publicly listed major provider of residential real estate services in the U.S. Its brands include Better Homes and Gardens® Real Estate, CENTURY 21®, Climb Real Estate®, Coldwell Banker®, Coldwell Banker Commercial®, Corcoran®, ERA®, Sotheby’s International Realty® as well as NRT, Cartus®, Title Resource Group and ZapLabs®, an in-house innovation and technology development lab. The company, headquartered in Madison, NJ, operates around the world with approximately 188,600 independent sales agents in the United States and approximately 111,200 independent sales agents in 113 other countries and territories. According to the most recent financial statement, Realogy spent US $202 million in marketing in the first nine months of 2019 versus 199 million during the first nine months of 2018.
Realogy provides independent sales agents access to leading technology, best-in-class marketing and learning programs, and support services to help them become more productive and build stronger businesses. In her expanded role, Amadeo tells Portada, she will be serving all the Realogy brands, while continuing to lead Multicultural National Advertising efforts at Century 21 Real Estate.
“As part of my expanded role, I will focus on managing our industry partnerships and increasing our agent and broker engagement efforts,” she commented. “Additionally, I will continue to work with CENTURY 21 on its Empowering Latinas campaign, which launched in 2017 and has awarded more than 100 scholarships to Latinas in Miami and Houston markets, as well as the brand’s collaboration with the Eva Longoria Foundation.”
Realogy’s Multicultural Objectives
When asked about which in her opinion are the main objectives of Realogy when it comes to the multicultural consumer, Amadeo answers that “Realogy has worked to elevate our engagement throughout the year, and has commenced a three-year Growth Markets strategic plan to leverage the scale of Realogy and better align our internal brand teams. We participate in industry conferences that specifically focus on policies that support a more diverse market.”
In addition, Amadeo explained that executives and affiliates volunteer as speakers to join the conversation and make a positive impact in the real estate industry and in the community in two ways: “First, as a shared service for our different brands, Realogy seeks to attract and retain diverse corporate talent, agents and brokers to mirror or exceed growth market demographics in the communities that we serve. Second, as end-consumer Realogy focuses on external diversity marketplace efforts by forming partnerships with professional real estate associations whose ongoing missions are to improve diverse homeownership rates, including among the Hispanic, Asian-American, African-American, and LGBT communities.”
Growth Opportunity
According to Amadeo, “the population growth and the increase in buying power of Hispanic, African-American, Asian, and LGBTQ segments has provided significant growth opportunities for companies that serve the needs of multicultural consumers. Brands that provide a high level of service and support to multicultural consumers are finding success. It’s not about simply having an ad in a different language. Rather, it is about being culturally relevant. We still need to see more ethnic diversity in marketing and media.”
Increased ROI
Amadeo adds that “According to Nielsen, the multicultural consumer is younger than the rest of the population and a trendsetter and taste maker across a broad range of categories, from food and beverage to beauty products.”
Reaching out to this segment has an important potential to increase ROI. As she explains, “Cultural traditions and social aspirations that drive multicultural shopping and product behaviors are also resonating with many mainstream shoppers, which increases return on investment and magnifies the business case for reaching multicultural consumers. Additionally, multicultural consumers have a higher life expectancy, living longer than their White Non-Hispanic counterparts.”
New Lead Generation Programs
Realogy’s overall marketing strategy has recently been strengthened by several lead generation programs, as we could infer from CEO Ryan Schneider’s conference call with financial analysts on November 7. Over the past year, Realogy has launched multiple marketing products, including Listing Concierge and Social Ad Engine to help drive better marketing for its agents.”We are excited to enter 2020 with three new high potential lead generation programs that can provide high quality leads to our agents and franchisees and deliver great value propositions to consumers,” said Schneider.
“In Q3, we launched Exclusive Look, a new marketing product available to all of our 47,000 Coldwell Banker owned brokerage agents share and search new listings before they are available to the broader market via public websites,” he added. “Second, last quarter, we launched TurnKey in collaboration with Amazon, as a new source of lead generation for our agents and franchisees. In Q3, we launched the Realogy Military Rewards program. And more recently we announced an Affinity lead generation program with AARP that will launch in Q1 of 2020.”
