Archive for August, 2010
How To Properly Market A Green Home
Posted by Sibet B Freides in Green, Marketing on August 4th, 2010
There is a great article on Builderonline.com that presents 10 steps to effectively advertise a high performance home. Some of the points seem a little obvious but the key to the article is bringing all of the points together to really drive a successful green home marketing campaign. You can read the article in its entirety here. Below are some of my favorite points.
#3 Integrate Green Into All of Your Marketing and Advertising
If you’re going to identify your product as being sustainable and energy efficient, you need to make sure that the message is being accurately carried out in everything you do. This includes property inserts, signs, social media, e-blasts, etc.
#1 Use an Established Brand That Requires Third-Party Certification
This is an absolute must. Not only will this improve your image in the minds of buyers but also making claims without these third-party certifications can actually get you in a lot of legal trouble. Going through the certification process can be time consuming and it will cost you but in the end it’s worth it. Consumers will be looking for the sustainable buzzwords.
A mix of #4 and #5
Training your sales force is crucial when it comes to selling a sustainable home. If they are not equipped with the proper knowledge it will difficult for them to sell the attributes. This makes the other point obtainable. By training your sales force you are empowering them to incorporate a green initiative in every step of the selling process. This includes understanding a buyer’s wants in a home and offering data to show the money that will be saved with energy-efficient features. Whatever a sales agent is good at, they can then incorporate green knowledge into their specialties.
I highly suggest reading this article if you haven’t already. Its full of great points that are very applicable to a changing market.
Generational Housing Desires
Posted by Sibet B Freides in Demographics, Marketing, Real Estate Economics, Real Estate Trends on August 2nd, 2010
A recent study asked 1,000 Americans to list the features of their dream home. All ages were polled including Gen-y, Gen-X, and Boomers. You can read about it here.
The article talks about each generation and what they desire in a dream home. It also offers an explanation as to why they chose these in relation to their stereotypical personality traits. Instead of focusing on the stereotypes, I think the more useful information comes from each generation’s life stage. For example, Gen-Y is young and mostly single. This is the major contributor to their desire for a home to be a social hub.
Then you have Gen-X who wants more family-focused features in their homes. I think saying their lack of desire for luxury or formality is because of their generation traits is a stretch. As the article notes many Generation-X are child bearing at the moment. They are looking for organization and means to control the chaos.
The Baby Boomers are described as the patient group finally getting their private home retreat as they become empty nesters. The problem with this outlook is that most baby boomers will not be retiring in this manner. I understand that the poll asked respondents about their dream homes and not their reality homes. It makes me wonder how accurate some of this information is. No where in the article do they talk about the hurting economy, a damaged housing market, or the toned down retirement life ahead. It would be hard for me to take this information and design a product for baby boomers as it doesn’t seem to take current economics into consideration.
This study is very interesting but I am not sure if we need to be using it to plan our next development like it suggests. I would take a lot of advice into consideration along with this input.
