Brief:

• Homesnap, a home search platform for real estate agents and their clients, partnered with navigation app Waze to provide geotargeted ads aimed at prospective homebuyers, per a press release made available to Mobile Marketer.
• Waze Ads by Homesnap lets agents reach potential buyers who are driving around nearby homes that are listed for sale. Homesnap has access to listings through a real-time feed, which lets brokers select the homes they want to promote in the Waze app, which has more than 90 million users worldwide.
• The platform promotes listings with map pins that highlight the listing’s photo and appear when Waze users are physically near the listing, and with sponsored search results that appear when drivers search for a related or nearby address.

Insight:

Homesnap’s partnership with Waze points to new ways to digitally reach prospective homebuyers while they're already searching for property listings and visiting open houses. The combination of a real estate database with smartphone navigation appears to be a solid strategy that harnesses the best capabilities of mobile technology, as well as Waze's large user network.

Homesnap, which lets people take a picture of a house to learn more about its details and value via their mobile device, also has a complementary version aimed at real estate agents called Homesnap Pro. The service currently combines more than 100 listing services with 750,000 members, according to the company.

Location-based ads signal the power of smartphone media in targeting and serving consumers contextually relevant content. While location-based ads provide value in several use cases — and were once described as the "holy grail of marketing" by WPP CEO Martin Sorrell — some marketers are concerned about unverified geolocation data and a lack of third-party provider knowledge. At the same time, consumers might be wary of ads tailored to their private location information. Despite these concerns, geotargeted ad sales are set to grow from $12.4 billion last year to $32.4 billion by 2021, according to researcher BIA/Kelsey. 

Meanwhile, the property listing market is getting increasingly crowded with digital services like Homesnap, Zillow and Zillow-owned Trulia. This growth points to potential success for Homesnap's partnership with Waze, as more consumers turn to browsing online for new homes and apartments due to the convenience and mobile elements.