If you are interested in how luxury homes are being marketed locally you can spend about a half hour on line and learn a lot. As a Broker and REALTOR I have direct access to the information in the Triangle Multiple Listing Service but a better way to get the broad picture is to use the REALTOR.com search which is available to anyone. This morning there are 84 Durham County listings of at least $700,000 or more. Interestingly, if you do the same search on REALTOR.com you get 90 listings. The difference appears to be that on REALTOR.com there are several Colvard Farms listings that are there because they are in the 27713 zip code and have a Durham address. (There are a total of 139 homes over $700,000 for sale in Chatham, by the way.)
On Realtor.com here are some things to look for:
1. Showcase. All MLS listings are fed to REALTOR.com but to “showcase” their listings, agents must subscribe to the service annually for a fee based on their previous year’s activities. The good news is that most agents are showcasing their luxury properties. A home not showcased only shows one picture. Showcased homes can carry the full twelve allowed in MLS. The other important feature of showcasing is that it allows the agent the opportunity to provide a fuller description of the home than the barebones information that is passed from the MLS system. Showcasing also allows links to visual tours.
2. Visual Tours. Of the 84 listings in MLS currently, 18 have visual tours. Visual tours are basically interactive slide shows. Several vendors are available to agents to produce visual tours. Some allow the agent to take several shots of the home and “stitch” them together for a panoramic view. Personally I think this is a little gimmicky. Sampling the visual tours it’s not hard to tell which agents are comfortable producing them. The better are captioned with pretty good copy and some nice music playing in the background. A couple I sampled required me to download the current version of the Java language, which I didn’t bother to do and suspect many others wouldn’t either. For some reason, sometimes agents that have virtual tours available on MLS, don’t include them on the REALTOR.com. At least some of the vendors have voiceover capability with the tours so that the agent could describe the property verbally, but I’ve seen that used only rarely.
3. Pictures. The quality of the photography varies widely in terms of selection and composition. The biggest sin is underexposure. Most point and shoot digital cameras have this tendency if there is any bright light in the room especially from a window. Most of the time this can be corrected to at least an acceptable level with the most basic photo editing software. Picassa, which is free from Google, is a good option.
4. Copy. One of the advantages of showcasing a home in REALTOR.com is the opportunity to add additional sales copy. For some reason, many agents don’t. What passes through from MLS is a very basic description and the list of features. This provides a lot of information about the house but nothing about what the experience of making it a home might be. There is a tendency among those who do take advantage of the opportunity to write more copy to elaborate more about the features of the house. Copywriters are admonished to sell the sizzle not the steak. Most of the copy never gets off the lot, much less into the neighborhood or the community. Durham’s three major luxury neighborhoods all have excellent country clubs but they are rarely mentioned. Each neighborhood has a different character and it’s part of what buyers, especially luxury buyers, are buying. Many people searching on REALTOR.com are not just searching in Durham. They may also be searching in Orange, Chatham, Cary and other parts of Wake County. With Durham’s lingering reputation as rough and ready, it is important to promote the community too.
A primary theme of this blog and the Durham Luxury Home Report available on the sidebar is the importance of adopting techniques a little more sophisticated than have been necessary in the past to jump start the luxury home market in Durham, which was flat long before the current national difficulties. The second report available in the sidebar is a buyers guide to luxury homes in Durham. It’s simply one person’s take on what is special in this community and how it might be communicated to potential buyers. Everybody marketing homes here needs to join that chorus to get things rolling again.
