Despite housing market downturn, real estate guide publisher eyes growth

Husband and wife duo Lesha Hageman and Anthony Holmes run Maximum Media Inc. out of the basement of their home. The two started the business 12 years ago. Today they publish eight different publications distributed in Columbia, Branson and Springfield.

There’s a lot of anxiety in the central Missouri real estate community these days, with home sales dipping and home construction in a nosedive, but a local publisher of real estate guidebooks is feeling bullish about the market.

Maximum Media Inc. is expanding, taking a calculated risk that all those real estate guidebooks placed in convenience stores, supermarkets and sidewalk racks will be the most attractive marketing venue for real estate agents and affiliated businesses.

Owned by husband-and-wife team Anthony Holmes and Lesha Hageman, Maximum Media publishes seven free real estate and automotive listings books serving central and southwest Missouri. During this year, Holmes and Hageman have expanded Maximum Media’s operations, hired a new employee, bought a new van and started the Branson Real Estate Book. Maximum Media now has 18 full-time and 10 part-time employees.

Holmes thinks the business may be affected by the housing slowdown but not in the same way other businesses are. With Columbia homes sitting on the market longer, he hopes real-estate agents will find value in placing advertisements that stick around for a while; the Columbia Real Estate Book publishes every two weeks.

“In a newspaper ad, you could spend $1,500, and it’s out for one day, then gone, he said. “Our prices run from about $300 to $450 an ad, give or take a little bit — that’s usually on a per-two-week or per-four-week cycle.”

Unlike those in a newspaper, Maximum Media ads don’t appear alongside editorial content. The ad books target people seeking ads about homes or vehicles, and after 12 years in the business Holmes and Hageman know how to put their products where consumers can find it.

“You’re counting on human behavior in the free publication industry,” Holmes said. “If they’re interested, they’ll take the extra couple of steps and pick it up. If not, they’ll walk right past it. The people who are interested are self-qualifying themselves.”

Holmes and Hageman bought The Real Estate Book of Columbia, a franchise of Atlanta-based Network Communications, in 1995. The next year they launched Maximum Media. The company has since started or bought 11 publications, expanding, selling or combining some of them along the way. Its current lineup comprises real estate guides in Columbia, Springfield and the Branson/Tri-Lakes area, apartment guides in mid-Missouri and Springfield, two mid-Missouri auto guides and the Columbia Visitor & Area Guide.

Hageman and Holmes run their real estate publishing company from home.

Looking to save on overhead and spend more time with the family, Holmes and Hageman moved their operation from a Parkade Center office to their home, off Gibbs Road in west Columbia, last July. Holmes said the move made sense in terms of consolidating the operation as well as for personal reasons. It brings the business full circle in a sense — Maximum Media started with Holmes and Hageman working part-time out of their home.

The company has maintained an annual growth rate of about 10 percent over the last decade, fueled by increases in the number of advertising accounts and in the size of existing accounts.

As Maximum Media has grown, it has refined its distribution system. The company started with a “seat of the pants” approach, Holmes said. Since then, it has moved from recording the amounts of books in Excel spreadsheets to using computer software that tracks the amounts of books and distribution routes. On the current system, all but three to five percent of the books are usually picked up.

“This is not a shotgun approach,” Holmes said. “This is targeted marketing in specific niche areas.”

The company distributes more than 40,000 copies per week. Each of the its six vans logs between 100 and 600 miles per week, delivering and restocking the books and “just keeping the rack looking its best,” said Gordon Craig, the company’s distribution manager. It can take two or three days to complete the busiest routes. The company’s distribution network covers 26 counties in mid-Missouri and another 13 counties in the Springfield-Branson area.

Distribution doesn’t stop with the delivery of the ad books to their first pick-up location. During the week, the delivery crews move copies from rack to rack to make sure there are always copies available. When they deliver the new issues, they take the leftover ad books to outlying cities like Warrensburg, Glasgow and Sweet Springs, which Holmes called the secondary routes.

In addition to printing and distributing its own ad books, the company provides ad design services to clients. It also distributes competing ad books, such as Central Missouri Real Estate, owned by Vision Media, by leasing those companies space in Maximum Media’s system of community racks.

Columbia Realtor Mike Huggans has placed ads in the Real Estate Book since its inception. These days he takes out four or five pages in each issue, in addition to advertising other media, to ensure a large presence in real estate advertising.

“The guy that’s got his name out more often is the guy that people are going to think of when they want to sell their house,” Huggans said. “That name recognition is important.”

Huggans and other real estate agents can’t use the Real Estate Book to advertise open houses — its bimonthly publication cycle isn’t suited to providing last-minute information — but the penetration of the books help market listings over the long term.

In October, Huggans got a call from a woman who had seen a log cabin-style house he had listed in the book. Her Realtor hadn’t shown her the house, so he called him and gave him some information about the listing, which led to a showing of the house.

Huggans said he think the state of the real estate market is what drives the success of real-estate ad-driven publications.

Where the auto guides are concerned, Premier Automotive owner Fred Braselton said low ad rates are part of the reason listing in the free auto books accounts for all of his print advertising.

“It’s just a local source to get your cars in front of buyers,” Braselton said. “Growing up in Boone County myself, you go to the grocery store and you can always pick up a free book. That’s probably why I started doing it.”
Some of Braselton’s customers even honor the request that tops each page of the book, “please say you saw it in the Missouri Auto Guide.”

“You’ll get a phone call that that they say ‘I saw your ad in the auto guide. Occasionally you have customers who bring it in and ask about a certain ad.”

Business aside, Holmes said he likes to look through the books himself.

“People dream about houses; people dream about cars,” he said. “I can be a looky-loo with the best of ’em.”