15 Ways to Market Your Development Faster

It used to be so easy building and selling homes. You drove forward by looking into the rear-view mirror. What sold yesterday, would sell today and presumably tomorrow. The old tried and true adage of unrolling that familiar floorplan, building it, selling it. Today, nothing is that easy anymore. The buyer's market is one thing; there's a lot of competing product out there. The new consumer is another; he or she wants quality, but doesn't want to pay premium prices for it. There's also a lot of tire-kickers out there. To some extent, it's no different than shopping for an automobile. Autos or abodes, there are all types of models out there, all with different types of features.

If you're a builder hoping to sell your wares, you first must know what will sell. Exactly who is the customer you're trying to access? If you've built the wrong type of product and thus miss the market, no amount of marketing or incentives will make much difference. The bulk of the buyers will simply stay away.

To build to sell, first analyze the municipality, the neighborhood and the specific area. Focus your efforts; neighborhoods can dramatically change within a few hundred metres and potential buyers' perceptions of these neighborhoods will change equally as dramatically. Within each area, conformity works. If an area is filled with custom houses, you know what to build. If it's stuffed full of handyman specials, well, you could be a pioneer...but unless they chose their ground well, pioneers often end up in trouble. Beware.

Then again, be aware of changing demographics. Today's buyer is different. Employed and often pressed for money, here in Vancouver he or she usually must be part of a dual-income team to afford that single-family home, duplex, condo or whatever.

Many of these would-be buyers take their work home. As in as many as 18 per cent of all western Canadians are self-employed and work from home. An office in a new home is essential.

In a new home finished basement family rooms are a good draw. If as a builder you don't want to put up the drywall, put up and sell the idea. For instance, one B.C. builder/developer working in Edmonton paints the possible 'floorplan' right on the floor so people can visualize what it would look like when finished. They even paint in a pool table.

Be mindful of offering incentives such as mortgage buydowns. Today's buyer is very sophisticated and knows there is no such thing as a free lunch; buydowns must come out of someone's pocket. To offer a one-year buydown (on a new home) is not enough. It's either a three-year mortgage buydown or not at all.

Smart builders create a "feeling" for the project and neighborhood which in turn is reflected in the advertising. This ambiance is difficult to achieve, but it can make a huge difference.

When building or trying to sell new, be aware of the existing resale competition. If the surrounding homes are new (three years or so), you must come in with a brand-new concept. Why would anyone pay more for an old idea. Especially as new homes are usually higher priced than resale to begin with. Every builder should toss their floorplans every year to stay fresh. Fresh may mean a "Romeo and Juliet" balcony, a gas fireplace in the master bedroom. Look around; some demographic areas might benefit from an in-law suite. (Check the bylaws first.) Whenever possible, fight to maximize the livable area. Wasted space is potential sale-killer.

In Vancouver, you can not ignore the offshore market. The offshore buyer generally will pay more for quality. He generally has more dollars to spend. For example, thanks to the falling Canadian loonie vis-a-vis the yen, the Japanese buyer has actually seen a 35-per-cent price reduction in two years in regards to Canadian real estate. Last year, some 6,000 new homes were built in the Lower Mainland; 1,000 of these were built in urban Vancouver. In areas which have no room for new subdivisions, it's obvious the new product can only go in as infill or at the expense of existing homes (read: tear-downs). Many of these new Vancouver homes have and are being targeted to the offshore buyer. To help meet this market, many canny local builders incorporate feng-shui guidelines into their designs. (Feng-shui is the ancient Chinese philosophy of "wind and water" and its effect on a building -- and its inhabitants -- luck and prosperity. (For a deeper look at feng-shui, JREI Publishing offers a special report on exactly that topic. Contact us if interested.)

Further to the offshore buyer however and especially in the condominium area, you can target too closely. A design and floor layout which sells in Hongkong won't necessarily sell here. Always build with the local homeowner's desires in mind .In fact, when it comes to target marketing, the price-point and end-user must be identified. No amount of cost-effective incentives (and we're not talking give-aways such as cars, boats or whatever) will salvage your sales if you miss the price point and end-user.

Understand where exactly the price point is for your development or building,. Bringing a $600,000- house down to $550,000 is meaningless if you had the wrong price-point to begin with. You cannot reduce it enough to matter. You almost have to wait it out.

If your objective is to generate traffic and give your marketers and salespeople some opportunities to try their skills, a mortgage buy-down or guaranteed buy-back may work. For example, in the early 1990s a number of Vancouver builders offered to buy back the home from any disgruntled buyer within two years of purchase. At the original price of course. This type of incentive worked very well indeed, especially as values rose later. If the builder and realtor can get together to ensure the would-be buyer's current home will be sold at a specific price, the builder's traffic will increase dramatically.

A small plug for high-intensity marketing by an expert company but ,why 10 per cent of all condo projects seem to attract all the attention. Call it a mixture of right-size units, right market, right gadgets (i.e.. a microwave) and of course, the right price point. If focused by a high-power marketing effort it will sell, buyer's market notwithstanding. Thus the successful "weekend blow-outs" while other developments languish. However, if even one element is missing, you could end up sitting alone on your own product.
But in the end, nothing takes the place of listening to your customers, checking out the competition, identifying the target and fastening upon that winning price-point and optimum design. It's like fishing; if you want to see what's working, first stand on the dock and see who's catching how much and with what bait.

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