Cool new ideas to relax, sip up…and me a real estate agent… (by way of the NYTimes)
…Though still a rarity, the office-camouflaging tactic is being tried in several parts of the real estate world. “You’re starting to see a lot more creative ways to reach out to people,” said Joel Burslem, a marketing expert in Portland, Ore., who founded a popular blog called Future of Real Estate Marketing. “It’s an awakening to the fact that agents really need to court buyers these days. They’re looking for ways to entice and engage.”
Of course, sooner or later, visitors to Ms. Jones’s plush coffee-bar-style lounge (which is open until 9 p.m. five nights a week) figure out that it is merely a comfortable place to browse property listings on the Internet, either via a 40-inch flat-screen television or at one of several desks outfitted with personal computers and designer lamps. The high-style atmosphere is a lure to get them in the door, something real estate agencies everywhere are finding harder to do as the house hunt increasingly goes virtual.
A similar experiment has been undertaken by Rick Higgins, founder of the Higgins Group (where Ms. Jones is a managing partner). A company storefront in Westport’s chic Main Street shopping area resembles a Chamber of Commerce information center. Visitors to the cozy wood-beamed space will indeed find useful local data, but a sales agent will also offer to walk them through the search technology on the Higgins Group Web site.
“It’s a nice icebreaker, without requiring a commitment emotionally of the people coming in,” Mr. Higgins said.
Thaddeus Wong, a co-founder of a company in Chicago called @Properties, has taken an even subtler approach. Last year, in the city’s River North neighborhood, Mr. Wong’s agency went into partnership with a Starbucks-style coffee shop; eventually, patrons logging into the cafe’s free Wi-Fi service will pull up the brokerage’s Web site.
Called @Spot, this is foremost a coffee shop (owned and operated by one of the company’s agents) that simply features the @Properties logo on its cups and sleeves. “It’s just another form of branding,” Mr. Wong said. “It’s just a little bit more of a progressive form of marketing.”
Not every such venture has met with complete success. In 1995, Bill Wendel pioneered an enterprise called the Real Estate Cafe about three blocks from the Harvard campus in Cambridge, Mass. The cafe invited buyers to look through property listing books on their own at a time when listings were not publicly accessible on the Internet. The agency operated on a fee-for-service basis, and sponsored networking events like a Roommate Rendezvous.
The need for such a clearinghouse dissipated after 2000, however, when listing and other real estate-related data became more readily available online. Mr. Wendel eventually went virtual…continued…
Source: NYTimes
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