Marketing Strategies: Luxury homes vs average priced homes
by Dale Erwin
Marketing Strategies: Luxury homes vs average priced homes
As you can imagine, driving up demand for a luxury home takes a uniquely different approach than does selling a regular home.
From the word go, you need a strong, clear and focused strategy that details how it will position your luxury home above the ordinary, illustrating and marketing its unique features in the proper manner to the perfect buyer at the perfect price.
There are some very different ideas, thoughts and strategies around marketing a luxury home, which in many cases is two to three times the median market price in the area. Using these tips, tricks and strategies, you can market your luxury home properly versus using strategies to get average-priced homes sold.
Here are some things you must know to market a luxury home properly:
Excellence is in the details
People who own luxury homes haven’t gotten where they are in life leaving things to chance. They realize that excellence lies in the details. When you’re marketing a luxury home, you need to demonstrate that the home is of the highest quality and worth the price you’re asking for it.
To do this, you must focus on even the smallest of details.
The best way to do this is to get the property decorated and staged properly — inside and out. The refinement that a luxury home offers needs to be seen in every nook and cranny of the home.
As an extension of that, you’ll want every marketing material, website presence and copy written about the home to be flawless and on point. The materials, like the home, need to be immaculate. In addition to that, you must be sure that every word is right from a spelling and grammatical standpoint.
More importantly, the language must be targeted towards someone who is a luxury buyer. It needs to speak to what they want in a high-end home and how your house will fulfill those desires.
Improperly staged luxury homes and/or marketing copy with typos and other mistakes may appear to be trivial, but they can have an extremely negative impact on how prospective buyers perceive your home.
Know your buyer
As a luxury seller, you likely have a lot in common with the prospective buyer for your home. As you plan your marketing strategy, consider why you bought the home and how that might relate to what other buyers might value in your home as well.
More specifically, put yourself in your buyer’s shoes. Understand what’s become important to luxury buyers since you first bought the house. Help them connect the dots by creating a list of the amazing amenities your house offers and then describe what you love about them.
Connecting with prospective buyers on an emotional level will add so much to getting buyers excited about your home.
Your marketing plan should target your top prospects as well as real estate agents in your area who regularly list and sell luxury homes. Remember to focus not just on the features, but also on the benefits of your home and what your ideal prospect values.
Make the investment in high-quality marketing materials and photography
Perception plays a huge role in someone’s willingness to pay more for a home. Your goal is to strengthen the perception that your home is an amazingly luxurious home at an incredible value for the right buyer.
To accomplish this, you need to showcase your home in a way that prospective buyers can appreciate your home for all that it offers. Investing in high-end, full-color marketing materials and getting a top-flight photographer to take professional pictures will help you make the right impression to your best buyer prospects. These days, it’s not uncommon to add well-created video and drone photography and video to your marketing to ramp up the appeal of your home.
In addition to that, it may be worth finding a professional copywriter to help produce the copy for your ads and brochures, while also creating a unique online presence. Take the time to also build a custom website for the home that helps it stand out from the other luxury homes in your market.
With such a larger percentage of buyers using the Internet for at least some portion of their home search — 92% for the eighth year in a row according to the National Association of Realtors® (NAR) — taking advantage of the best digital marketing tools will ensure your home truly stands out in the highly competitive marketplace of luxury homes.
Make sure the price is right
At the end of the day, whether you’re selling a $100,000 home or a $1,000,000 home — but especially a $1,000,000 home — it needs to be priced properly if you’re going to sell it for top dollar.
Yes, you need to do all the other things we’re recommending here, but when all is said and done, the price needs to be in line with what buyers are going to pay for your home.
Pricing is as much of a science as it is an art and there is a certain amount of strategy and psychology that goes into pricing a home so that it will sell for top dollar in a reasonable amount of time.
If your home is priced properly and you generate a large number of buyer leads with the proper marketing strategy, the outcome should be that your home sells at the top of the market in a time frame that works well for you.
The best thing to do would be to make contact with a real estate agent that understands how to price properties well.
If you’d like to find out what your home will sell for in today’s market, click here.
Create some “fascination” around your property
Marketing a luxury home requires that you do more to generate some mystique around your property than you would with an averaged price home. It’s not just about selling the home’s most distinctive features, it’s also about creating a certain prestige that sparks desire among interested buyers.
You want your home to have a distinctive aura that grabs hold of people when they first see and then experience your home. Luxury buyers aren’t just looking for a home, they want a lifestyle residence that excites and interests them. You want to make living at your home an experience that they can’t get anywhere else. You can accentuate those kinds of opportunities by using copy in your marketing about the spacious size of your kitchen or how your home is a great space for hosting dinner parties or enjoying big, family breakfasts on weekends.
Focus on what kind of lifestyle people can experience by owning your home.
Marketing your luxury home is a large, very involved job that requires some specific know how in order to get it done right. If you want to execute these principles properly to get your home sold in a reasonable amount of time for the most amount of money, you should consult with a local real estate agent who knows how to do the things we’ve mentioned here.
Not only will it save you a lot of time and money, but also it will help you get the job done right from the beginning.
If you want to market your luxury home for all that it’s worth, pay close attention to what we’ve discussed today. Investing the right amount of time, energy and money in strategies that highlight and accentuate your home as luxury, lifestyle residence will get you great results in the end.
If you’d like to talk to someone about putting a solid marketing plan together for your luxury home, click here.