Real Estate Brokers: Rewriting The Book On High-End Marketing

Real estate brokers, time to face the facts: In Canada’s hottest markets, the temperature is falling fast…except on the high end of the market. If you plan to sell the million-dollar properties, you have to move into the high-end marketing tools. Forget the iPhone apps. Search for a newly-minted Master of Fine Arts qualified to produce the art book that masterfully represents and complements your seven-digit property. The state of the art is art.

The fundamental marketing principle has not changed. The promotional tools always should be proportional to the product. In real estate, then, an affordable condo warrants a flyer, and a nice home in a well-established development probably deserves a three-fold brochure. Given the proportions, the perspective, and the state of the art, the deluxe waterfront property with tennis courts and an indoor pool naturally demands a hand-crafted “presentation book.” The more it resembles the work of the great masters, the more effective it will be. Handsome carrying case sold separately.

The example par excellence
For their Bayview development, Calgary developers Ken and Patricia Mariash have commissioned lavish sales books worthy of the National Gallery of Canada, maybe the Louvre. Elegantly crafted, exquisitely presented, Bayview’s deluxe two-volume “presentation book” issues a challenge to every other developer—“just try to top this!” it says defiantly. The book accounts for Bayview’s phenomenal pre-sales. The development sold out before the first tractor dug into the dirt. More importantly, the Mariashs claim that the book has engendered pride of ownership in the buyers, dramatically reducing “churning”—turn-over among buyers before they occupy the units.

These are — in the most literal sense possible — coffee table books. They are totems for display, tchotchkes of acquisition, status and prestige compiled for all to see, a housing development eternalized by being set on slick-coated paper. “These books are designed to be conspicuous in even the most ostentatious living room, just the thing to place beside the orchid arrangement or the Peruvian antiquities. The hope is that guests might take a peek at their pages, then run out to buy a condo of their own. [Source: Trevor Boddy, The Globe and Mail]

Surely the books are proportional to Bayview’s grandeur, the buyer must assume. If anything, Boddy understates the book’s grandeur and artistry. It takes a very special talent to render a floor-plan as high art, and it takes some serious wordsmithing to develop the literary qualities in an architectural review. The books do that. The artists and writers, meanwhile, continue yearning for gallery exhibitions, worldwide publication, or maybe a patronage.