Branding and Luxury Homes

A friend and reader of the Durham Luxury Real Estate blog forwarded an article to me about branding in real estate. The analysis was primarily intended for large national developers but it made some points worth considering in our effort to improve the marketing of luxury properties in Durham.

This blog has taken the point of view that one of the reasons, if not the primary reason, that the luxury home market in Durham is not more vibrant, is that the Durham “brand” has not caught up with the emerging reality. This is not a unique observation. During the last couple of years the Durham Convention and Visitors Bureau has headed up an effort to brand Durham as the city “Where Great Things Happen.” The group that developed this slogan and the the graphics associated with it represented a broad spectrum of community groups. As you might suspect, some compromise would be necessary to reach a consensus. Nevertheless, if promoted aggressively and adopted widely, this will improve the situation. To put some legs under it, it needs a more concrete emphasis. Just like marketing homes, the community needs to emphasize what marketers call a “unique selling proposition.”

For years the Chamber successfully promoted Durham as the City of Medicine in spite of the fact that the vast majority of people consider medicine as something you take when you are sick. What the city fathers had in mind, of course, was medicine as a noble profession and it let us emphasize the number of people that lived here with post graduate degrees and the ascendency of Duke as one of the leading medical centers in the world.

With that firmly established, the strongest reason we can offer people to look closely at us now is the fact that we are rapidly becoming the “arts and entertainment” hub of the Triangle. The cumulative impact of our great selection of fine restaurants, the DBAP and the DAP, the Arts Council, the Golden Belt development, the Carolina Theater, and the new Performing Arts Center is that it’s not a hard case to make that Durham is a great place to live, maybe even the best place in the Triangle to live. The emphasis on “arts and entertainment” was what propelled the initial marketing of downtown revitalization. That direction also helped it attract residential and business development as well as encourage additional growth in arts and entertainment.

The real estate community and especially those that market luxury properties need to wave that banner more and more. The copy in our brochures and on our web sites needs to address the fact that people aren’t just looking for shelter, they’re looking for a lifestyle. If we depend on news outlets to create our image the emphasis will be on what is dysfunctional and dangerous, not what is beautiful and enriching.

Currently the City Council is debating a proposed budget that drastically cuts the funding to several arts organizations that have been part of that revitalization. Without taking sides in the debate about whether public funds should be used, community support of our arts organizations is critical to enhancing Durham’s image and establishing our “brand.”