Seth Godin is an author, marketing guru and blogger whose posts are often short and sometimes cryptic but always interesting. This is a short post from June 20th that has relevance in the Durham luxury home market today.
Your sales force and your customers may scream that you need to lower your price.
It’s not true.
You need to increase your value. If people don’t want to pay, it’s because you’re not delivering enough value for the money you’re charging.
You’re not selling a commodity unless you want to.
How does this advice apply to real estate, especially luxury real estate?
As the CEO of a small business with one purpose…to sell your home…in a slow market it is quite conceivable that your marketing director/listing agent and potential customers would put pressure on you to lower the price. The irony is that often you don’t have to add value as Godin suggests, all you have to do is point it out. Levittown, PA was the original “commodity” suburb, with row after row of similar houses…six models actually…built after World War II. 
Luxury homes are the antithesis of commodity homes. Yet so much copy written about luxury homes focuses on commodity features such as size and rooms and not the experience of living in the home or the community. Size and quality in the shelter component of a luxury home are a given. The added value comes from the less tangible things. To get the best price the marketing materials need to illustrate these things.
This may take some practice. Few real estate agents working today have ever had the experience of working in this kind of real estate market where the buyer is king and more sophisticated marketing is needed to make a listing stand out and command a premium price. The appeals are as different as the homes. The emphasis can be on entertaining, privacy, security, architectural distinction, social connections, history or even pure hedonism. It’s selling the sizzle not the steak, the au gratin not the potato. Does your listing agent talk about the thrill of victory or just give the score.
