Real estate website and publisher Inman.com has put out a new report called The State of Real Estate Marketing. It’s based on results from an online survey of US real estate professionals, which had a total of 770 respondents. The survey found that search engine marketing was the most popular category of online advertising.

Fifty-two percent of survey respondents said they planned to by search keywords “next year.” SEO was popular too, with 42 percent responding that they planned to invest. Amounts budgeted for keyword advertising were from $0 to $5,000+ (on an annual basis).

According to the report:

Approximately 64% of respondents said they planned to spend at least some money on keyword advertising in the next year. Half of these keyword buyers identified themselves as real estate agents, 23% said they were real estate brokers and 11% were broker/agents. The others included some marketing consultants and mortgage brokers.

Almost 38% of respondents who planned to buy keywords had less than five years’ experience in real estate. Some 30% had 5-15 years’ experience and 28% had more than 15 years’ experience. Those figures suggest keyword buyers are slightly more likely to be newcomers to the business.

I have some additional information from the report on my blog.

According to the Newspaper Association of America, U.S. print newspaper classified advertising was worth about $17 billion in 2006. The category has been under pressure for years from top online verticals, some of which are owned by newspapers, eBay, Craigslist and, now, new aggregators and destinations such as Oodle , LiveDeal and Edgeio, among others.

Now eBay has brought its Craigslist-inspired classifieds marketplace, Kijiji, to the U.S. market. The auction site acquired a 25 percent stake in Craigslist in 2004 and launched Kijiji in early 2005 outside the U.S. eBay owns Rent.com in the U.S. as well as other classifieds listings sites in Europe.

According to comScore, as of mid-2006, there were almost 180 million monthly visitors to U.S. classifieds destinations. Craigslist was the category leader at almost 14 million uniques. Those numbers are undoubtedly larger now.

eBay has had a board seat (one of three) at Craigslist since it made the investment and there are ethical questions surrounding its continued participation given that the company is now unquestionably a direct competitor of Craigslist through Kijiji.

For the time being Kijiji listings are free, but eBay has indicated it may introduce premium listings or other paid services in the future.

While eBay is a formidable competitor and online brand its success in the category is not a foregone conclusion. There’s tremendous competition from well-established sites and more recent market entrants. And as a “horizontal” listings marketplace Craigslist “owns the brand.” Just as Google Base, misunderstood at launch as a Craigslist or eBay “killer,” has not done either, Kijiji is unlikely to have a materially negative impact on Craigslist.

It will, undoubtedly, contribute to the continuing migration of classified listings from print to online. Major newspapers, for their part, have been reacting to this trend for some time with varying degrees of success. More recently, most of the major newspaper publishers have joined forces with Yahoo to create a potentially powerful network and consortium that touches almost all 50 U.S. states and most local markets.