Speaking of desperate Times, more bad news may be coming for the struggling Seattle-area newspaper as longtime advertiser Windermere Real Estate mulls pulling out of the Sunday Times, and taking its four pages a week of advertising with it. And if Windermere goes, could other realtors be far behind?
In recent meetings, Windermere managers have advised agents of the possible end to the weekly, multi-page advertising buy, which has been a fixture in the Times’ real estate section for… well… forever. Agents were told that with 87-percent of clients now coming to Windermere via the Internet, management is exploring whether newspaper ads still provide a sufficient return on investment to justify their cost.
Managers also cited what they saw as relentless and overly gloom-and-doomish coverage of the local real estate market on the Times’ front page, complaining that compared to the rest of the nation the local market is actually much healthier than the Times reports. I guess the thinking is, why spend money advertising in a paper that’s actually hurting your business?
But whatever the reason, chalk up yet another formerly steady revenue source on which the dailies can no longer rely.