By Cecilia Campbell

Chief Marketing Officer

United Robots

Malmö, Sweden

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Most of the small local news publishers in the United States that our team at United Robots talks to battle one common problem: Their newsrooms do not have the resources to produce all the unique local content their readers expect.

The two topics that most often come up as underreported are high school sports and real estate.

Here, I'm going to focus on the latter, explaining how content automation can help under-resourced local newsrooms get a thriving real estate section off the ground.

These examples of articles about price trends over time and recently sold properties published by the Press Democrat in California are representative of the kinds of articles automation can create.

Buying and selling a home is the biggest financial decision in most people's lives, and reliable information and analysis of the local real estate market is an important factor in that decision.

Local news publishers who establish themselves as providers of trustworthy and regular real estate coverage have a lot to gain.

The key is to publish information about the market on a really local level. The stories closest to home, literally in the case of real estate, are the most valuable and relevant to local readers.

From data to articles

So, what part can content automation play in this? Thanks to the existence of high-quality, reliable, and regular data on house sales, quite a significant one.

The text robots we, and providers like us, have built, use structured data as the "raw material" for editorial texts, which are generated using natural language generation (NLG) and rules-based AI.

This is not generative AI. Rather, word, clause, and sentence alternatives are written by humans (our team, in our case) and data points (such as address, price, and property size) are inserted, which generates thousands of combinations of sentences to create unique, factual articles.

The robot also performs data analysis, meaning the texts include comparisons over time, across neighbourhoods, counties, and so on. We also add an image from Google Street View to the content package. For some publishers, we include a weekly list of all sales destined for their print product.

A turnkey real estate section

In addition to the short articles about individual house sales, we produce a number of different top lists for any given geography. These include most expensive, most affordable, what X dollars will get you in area Y, best deals (based on a defined price range and home type), and more.

We have news publisher partners using the automated content to significantly bulk up their real estate sections. Some even use the automated lists and articles to set up such a section from scratch.

Once the section is in place, the key is to make sure local readers can find the content. The publishers who are most successful in driving engagement have Real Estate included in the top menu and promote the content elsewhere on the home page.

We've also seen an uptick of between 100%-150% in pageviews when publishers cross link between the top lists and the longer texts about individual sales.

Creating value for you and your readers

By publishing content and analysis about the local real estate market specifically, local news publishers have an opportunity to really add value to their publication. This creates a reason for readers to come back and check in with the regularly updated content.

We know this type of content drives traffic, engagement, and even subscription sales for clients in the United States as well as Scandinavia.

And, of course, content that is popular with readers is popular with advertisers and sponsors.

For real estate, specifically, there are obvious opportunities for premium advertising and sponsorships given the context. We have small U.S. publisher partners driving significant revenue through package sponsorships of all real estate content online, in print, and in topical newsletters.

By publishing automated real estate content, publishers expand their local coverage and service to readers without impacting newsroom resources. With the added revenue opportunities, this popular local content can also directly support the mission of local journalism.

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About Cecilia Campbell

Cecilia Campbell is chief marketing officer at United Robots in Malmö, Sweden. She can be reached at [email protected] or @CianMian.

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