Every month, we interview a top-producing Certified Luxury Home Marketing Specialist to learn more about their real estate success story and celebrate their achievements. With every interview, we learn more about how top producers are nurturing their clients, marketing homes, and professional development to grow their practice.
In the spirit of starting a brand new year, we wanted to put together some of the best marketing, professional development, and client relationship tips that we have heard in our interviews in 2019 to give you a collection of invaluable insights to pull from and use in your own luxury real estate practice moving ahead into the rest of 2020.
On Marketing:
1. Dropping the price isn’t always the answer for a slow-moving listing
Patrick Ryan, our 2017 Outstanding Achievement Award winner, suggests raising the perceived value of a slow-moving listing by way of renovations to fit the most interested buyer’s needs after legal agreements are made, or even by taking the property off the market.
While taking the property off the market may seem counterintuitive, he says that at times, the integrity to your original asking price can send the message to buyers that the property is, in fact, a valuable asset.
Taking your listing off the market to wait for better conditions also conveys an air of scarcity that can move buyers to make a decision. If you and your client are confident that you have done all that you can to showcase their property’s value, this can be a helpful strategy in the midst of a slowdown.
2. Tell a story with your listings
Although Jordan Ayan is a “newcomer” to luxury real estate, he achieved $22M in closed volume between 2017 and 2019. He credits his team’s real estate success to their ability to tell stories through their listings and clearly depicting the lifestyle they offer through creative styling.
Jordan says their listing photography will include things like a styled pasta and wine dinner in an Italian rustic kitchen, or a full Sunday brunch out on a big, bright patio.
He says, “We think our job is to tell the story [of the property], and we have to tell it in 800 characters or less in the MLS.”
3. Make large estates more “digestible” for today’s luxury buyer
Kris Anderson, a CLHMS Guild Member and member of Who’s Who in Luxury Real Estate, has adapted to today’s luxury buyer by breaking down large luxury estates into smaller, more appealing concepts in light of the shift away from mega mansions and sprawling estates.
“We’re trying to break up those big estates and focus on some of the things they could do with them. For example, we have a 14-acre parcel. We know we could subdivide that, or we could turn that into animal rescue opportunity. We’re just trying to take something that’s an albatross and break it down into something more servable,” she explains.
On Nurturing Client Relationships:
1. Be flexible with your time
Winner of our 2016 Best Marketing Strategy Award, Elizabeth McQueen has solidified her real estate success by always keeping lines of communication open.
She has learned to embrace quick calls, texts and emails because “people are busy and a quick phone call just to say ‘hi’ can hit the sweet spot in my opinion. But other times I recognize the need to be more personal and host a full-on dinner experience.”
2. Keep your clients in the loop– no matter how busy you both are
Carl and Christie Battista of the Battista Team had their first luxury real estate win in the crash of 2008, beating the odds for new luxury real estate agents. One of the creative ways they keep their clients informed is by creating video snippets of themselves doing the day-to-day marketing of a seller’s home, whether they’re doing a quick last-minute vacuuming before a showing or going out to network, and then sends it to the seller through text or email.
“They just love it, they’re wowed by the extent you’re going to market their property and we found that most sellers have no idea what’s happening day-to-day unless you do something like this,” Christine says.
On Professional Development:
1. Commit to lifelong learning
Sought-after speaker and winner of the Inman News’ “Innovator Award”, CLHMS member Jim Walberg believes that his commitment to real estate education is one of the driving forces behind his real estate success.
“We’ve been participating in the Leaders In Luxury Conference for ten years, and there’s nothing that replaces the face-to-face experience with fellow colleagues from around the country. The content is probably the richest content that we get from any of the conferences that we attend, and we attend quite a few each year,” he explains.
“My experience is that if agents don’t get involved in the conferences, they’re missing out on three-quarters of the benefits of being a member of the Institute.”
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