Targeted Marketing
Years of experience in Vancouver's condominium market has taught me a lot, but most of all that marketing must be targeted to be effective. Advertising a $4,000,000.00 luxury waterfront condominium in an alternative downtown-weekly, whos readership consits mostly of young renters, is a waste of time and money, not to mention paper.
Careful historical tracking and analysis of buyer's inquiries has resulted in a highly refined, targeted marketing program that focuses on connecting with buyers who are most likely to buy a luxury downtown condominium.
Here's our strategy:
1. Pricing
This is where 80% of your marketing is done right off the bat. It's fair to say that in Vancouver, real estate is a sport. Buyers know value and if you over-price, you're property simply won't sell. Intelligent pricing is paramount. Without it, all the other marketing efforts are useless.
Shaun's 2-pronged pricing approach:
A) Identify the property's true market value; and
B) Help you decide how to get there.
WARNING: in Vancouver's real estate market, it is much easier and potentially more costly to over-price a property than to under-price it. Over-pricing results in frustration, stress and expired listings. Intelligent pricing often generates multiple offers resulting in a quick sale at the highest price. Quick sales are often the best sales in terms of sale price.
2. Professional photos and Video Tours
We employ professional photographers and videographers to make sure your property is best represented. Please click on the following link to view an example of one of our listing videos.
http://www.vopenhouse.ca/vid/3047_cordova/
3. MLxchange.com (the realtor's MLS system)
MLS is unequivocally the best and fastest way to expose your listing to the widest possible market. As long as you want your property listed in MLS, your listing will be featured in realtor's MLXchange MLS system, reaching tens of thousands of licensed realtors and buyers.
4. MLS.CA
The vast majority of buyers who contact me about a listing say they have have seen the listing online and www.MLS.ca is a very effective tool in this regard. Every property listed in MLS will be automatically featured in mls.ca. This site is accessable to anyone with internet access. Please click on the page below to launch MLS.CA to see how it works.
5. Realtylink.org
Realtylink works in conjunction with mls.ca and features open houses and photo/video tours. Like mls.ca, all of my MLS listings are automatically featured in realtylink.org. Please click on the page below to launch realtylink and see how it works.
6. www.shaunkimmins.com and Shaun's specialty websites
We are committed to taking advantage of the ongoing evolution of internet technology. As a result, shaunkimmins.com is becoming an increasingly effective means of marketing your property. We are currently adding new video capabilities and content that will help furnish viewers with much of the information they need to help them make a purchasing decision. We do this by displaying professional photos & videos of your listing, floorplans, maps and detailed descriptions of your property. Our new video capability, CONDO TV, will feature presentations on market conditions, statistics, tips for buyers and sellers and in-depth property and area tours. Shaun's website ranks highly in Google's seaches and paired with our other targeted marketing, is specifically designed to sell your property.
7. The Real Estate Book
We take a full page ad, featuring all our listings, in every issue of The Real Estate Book. The Real Estate Book is one of the world's largest real estate publications with magazines in cities across North America. Locally the Real Estate Book publishes 37,000 copies monthly. The Book is distributed throughout Vancouver at lifestyle locations such as coffee shops & restaurants, banks and credit unions, and it's in front of all Starbucks coffee shops. From time to time we are rewarded with the cover shot featuring your listing. Click on the photo below to go to the REAL Estate Book's website and have a look.
Sample ad from The Real Estate Book:
8. Homes & Land Magazine
We take a full page ad, featuring all our listings, in every issue of Homes & Land magazine. Homes & Land magazine publishes 45,000 copies monthly. The magazine is direct-mailed to 25,000 high income households, professional offices and feeder markets outside Vancouver as well as many real estate developers. It's distributed throughout Vancouver and Whistler at locations such as: coffee shops, restaurants, affluent shopping areas and fine hotels . Click on the photo below to go to the Homes & Land magazine website and have a look.
Sample ad from Homes and Land Magazine:
9. Auto Blog (through Feedburner) direct to email inboxes
All our listing, sales, BLOG and CONDO TV episodes are now available automatically by email. Everyone who enters their email address in the field on our home or blog page automatically receives all of our market updates, listing and sales activity and CONDO TV content via email. We currently have an email database of over 1000 such subscribers.
10. E-flyers
We create and email an informational e-flyer to our entire email database. The flyers contain specs, floorplans, descriptions and professional photos as well as links back to shaunkimmins.com for more information. A new flyer goes out to our entire database for every new listing. See the sample screen-shot below:
11. Good old fashioned snail mail
As much as we would like to see everyone web-enabled, this is simply not the case just yet. Many of our investors still like to receive updates in the mail. We are striving to minimize our environmental footprint and to that end we are working on converting all of our correspondance to electronic.