Durham N. Carolina’s Adwerx is a digital advertising platform for residential real estate that was created using a concept and code for a completely different vertical, musicians. Jed Carlson and his team of now 37 employees used their experience to build a system that allows 5 agents in a specific zip code to “retarget” consumers whose online behavior has identified them as potential homebuyer or seller. This type of targeting tracks consumers and delivers ads to someone who may have been searching for moving services or any number of other activities that allow for “top of mind” consumer awareness of an agent, listing or broker’s recruiting efforts. Carlson told me that it can drill down to around 400 targeted prospects from a pool of 10,000 general consumers.

Launched in 2013, Adwerx has 20,000 clients that pay as little as $40 per per zip code on their desktop platform. Today Adwerx is launching a mobile first effort that will now deliver ads on smartphones and tablets. The mobile platform will cost an average of $99 per zip.

I had an opportunity to demo the platform that Realtors use to create a campaign. It was simple and straightforward. The wizard based system allows for the creation of an ad using the system or a pre designed ad can be uploaded.

Carlson recognizes that the threshold has been crossed for consumers and mobile devices are now used for 52% of online activity. That number is expected to grow exponentially. “We’re a mobile first society” said Carlson.

Adwerx, a finalist for Inman’s 2015 innovator award, is a spin-off of Reverb Nation. The platform was originally designed to give independent artists with limited budgets the ability to engage fans and sell music and tickets using the same type of big-data targeting used by large labels. Carlson and his team hedged a bet that the real estate industry’s structure was a good fit. Getting to a milestone of 20K clients in a little over a year is impressive and they have done an equally impressive job working with brokers as partners to set up white labeled, brand specific versions of the system.

Are you an Adwerx client? We’d love to hear about your experience.