From the category archives:

Offering a Home

Oak Drive Mansion

August 5, 2009
Thumbnail image for Oak Drive Mansion

So far in eighty some posts I have not really featured any of the luxury homes in Durham. But I’ve got a lot of reasons for featuring 11 Oak Drive.  First of all I was the agent for the current owners, Steve and Kim Van Horn when they bought the home several years ago. Steve [...]

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Economic Indicators

June 7, 2009

Economy Up, Service Down
I have long believed that the health of the economy is inversely proportional to the quality of service in fast food restaurants. When the economy is good, service truly sucks because they are forced to hire  the dregs of the labor pool.  When the economy is bad they can be more selective [...]

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Copywriting for Luxury Homes

May 25, 2009

Whatever else you think of the New York Times, the writing is great and the coverage topical. None more topical than a story in Sunday’s Times about a woman in New York who makes her living writing copy for real estate companies. Topical for me because I’m in the process of launching a new website [...]

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Owner Financing?

February 7, 2009

I get bombarded with solicitations for money making “opportunities” that are vague about what is required until the offerer gets a credit card number and makes some money themselves.
While I was writing the last series of posts about marketing homes in a buyers market, I received one of these solicitations in the US mail. I [...]

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Series Summary

December 26, 2008

With more sellers than buyers in the real estate market across the country, listing agents will need to employ more sophisticated approaches to marketing homes. In the Durham luxury home market, which had been slow even before the general market decline, these new approaches require even more urgency.  The preliminary data that I’ve looked at [...]

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Channel Marketing in Luxury Real Estate

December 23, 2008

Stan Lee and Me
The many years I spent in bank marketing I thought were pretty interesting but I notice that people’s eyes glaze over when I talk about how bank marketers had to learn a whole new set of skills during the period of deregulation in the late 70’s and early 80’s and how there [...]

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Promotion and writing copy

December 22, 2008

V8 engine in a Q45 Infinity
The most dramatic lesson I ever had about writing copy wasn’t even written down. I was shopping for a car and had my eye on a used Infinity Q45 that was at a Lexus dealership in Raleigh.  As I was pondering my decision the salesman happened to mention that he [...]

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Web Presence in the Luxury Market

December 21, 2008

Sometimes I wonder as I delete the 100th spam email that somehow gets past spam filters on the server and my computer whether the internet will be like our financial system and someday collapse under its own weight. The internet can be profane, invasive, distracting and misinforming. It gives voice, however feeble, to the ignorant [...]

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The Certified Home

December 18, 2008

If you ever need your spirits lifted around Christmas and have seen It’s a Wonderful Life about ten too many times, pretend like you’re twelve again and watch a dog story. I was going to do this article last night but flipping around the channels I came across Firehouse Dog about a third of the [...]

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Pricing in Today’s Market

December 16, 2008

Pricing in the luxury market is trickier than in what might be called the “commodity home” market.
The more unique a home is the more pricing becomes an art than a science. As a ridiculous example in a post in March I used the  an estate in Lake Tahoe pictured below that was on the market [...]

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Christmas Present

December 15, 2008

Anyone planning to put a luxury home on the market in the spring will start thinking about it months in advance under normal conditions. Since conditions in the real estate market are anything but normal now, Christmas is not too early to begin planning a market launch in the spring.
Two Themes
Two themes have been emphasized [...]

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Inman Post

November 25, 2008

Inman news is a real estate industry site “Where Real Estate and Technology Connect.” There are usually blog-like discussions going on about various topics in the real estate industry. This morning’s lead article was nominally about how real estate offices must shrink (to reduce costs) but was really more handwringing about where the industry is [...]

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A Real Marketing Plan

November 15, 2008

When I first got my real estate license I assummed that my many years of marketing experience and the knowledge I had acquired renovating and flipping a couple of condos would be a good basis for my new career.
I was mistaken.
I didn’t fit the profile at all of what the industry considered a potentially successful [...]

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Paralysis

October 25, 2008

The decline of an icon
The spectacle of a New York bank, Citicorp, and a San Francisco bank, Wells Fargo, picking over the bones of Wachovia is enough to make you sick.
In the late seventies I spent two years working for Wachovia in Winston-Salem as the product manager for retail deposit services. When I was recruited [...]

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It’s Time for Football!

October 1, 2008

My first visit to Durham was almost 45 years ago when I was a high school senior and was being courted as a football recruit by all the Triangle ACC schools and a number of others as well. The planes were propeller driven and they rolled steps out to the runway apron to deplane passengers [...]

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