Citysnap campaign taps into home searchers' biggest anxieties

Your rental anxieties take the spotilght in a new campaign from real estate platform Citysnap.

Digital and poster ads running in New York City and other markets capture city dwellers' everyday issues with apartments. One features neighbor who's a bit too comfortable in front of his windows while another shows a couple finding out they're pregnant—when they're living in a tiny one-bedroom apartment.

Citysnap emerges as a challenger to listings platform StreetEasy, owned by Zillow. It was been in the works for four years and was developed by real estate data firm CoStar Group, Inc. along with the Real Estate Board of New York (REBNY). It bills itself as the first search site to feature all listings from REBNY's Residential Listing Service. 

The new out-of-home push comes from agency Supernatural, co-founded by Paul Caiozzo, who previously had created campaigns for StreetEasy, such as one that lovingly poked fun at living in NYC as well as another featuring Venn Diagrams of the home search. 

Supernatural boasts an AI-powered platform, affectionately dubbed "the machine," that helps inform the agency's creative direction on campaigns. For this particular project, it yielded insights around how the city has changed drastically over the years, except for how people find new places to live. It also found out that New Yorkers’ attitudes towards the city itself have changed and that people were more focused on finding a place with a separate working space rather than focusing on location. for example. 

Other insights reflected the current struggles of finding a place to live in New York. Those centered around time constraints, inaccurate information and COVID deals being over, all making it harder than ever to move within any borough of New York.