The range of marketing material that is required can depend on the lengths you will need to go to sell your product given the current real estate market. In a hot market a basic flyer and a price list may be all that is required. However, to maximise sales prices and sales velocity it is important to arm your sales team with the best tools and that means creating good marketing collateral.
The preferred but expensive route to create marketing collateral is to engage a public relations and communications company to work through a branding exercise on your development. After defining your target market you choose a name, look at key messaging, a logo and the imagery for use in advertising and end up with the design and production of all the sales materials. You will want to include the real estate agent and, if they add value, the architect and even interior designer in this process. For a large and/or high end luxury development it may be worth the cost to create your marketing material this way, but it will be expensive and time consuming.
The cheap way is to simply use the real estate agent’s existing templates. That is fine when you are subdividing a section of the back of an existing property, but will be too limiting to capture attention for a larger subdivision in a competitive market — plus it could look very average!
The middle ground, and the preferred cost versus value approach for most small to medium house and land developments, is to hire a design firm or graphic designer to help you put together custom marketing collateral. Between yourself and your agent figure out a name and the key messages (already identified as part of competitive positioning) you want to spread to potential buyers and get the designer to put it all together in the various formats required to advertise.
Applying the middle ground approach, here is my recommended list of what marketing collateral you will need at a minimum:
Printed Collateral
- Brochure
- Exterior artist’s impression/render
- Interior artist’s impression/render
- Location and amenity plan
- Subdivision site plan
- House floor plans
- Price list
- Outline specifications
- Sale and purchase agreements
- Rental assessment.
Miscellaneous Collateral
- Colour and sample boards (one to three options of different colour and material palates that you will let buyers choose from).
- Website — essentially the brochure online.
- Advertisements — essentially the brochure in advert forms focusing on key messaging.
Let’s look at some of these in more detail.
Andrew Crosby
+64 21 982 444
andrew@xpectproperty.com
