The 4 Best Tricks to Sell Luxury Real Estate

Selling luxury real estate: $ 2.3 million mansions, $ 4.4 million villas, $ 2.6 million penthouses … it involves particular sales and promotion techniques. There are real estate agents who believe they are able to sell this type of property based on their experience in selling lower value homes.

But when they begin to realize that it is not so easy to contact potential customers, the first thing they think is that the property is overvalued or there is no demand market at that time. As the saying goes: “Ignorance is very daring”.

These real estate agents do not understand that their problem is in their approach and in the means they use to reach the potential client. What would you think if I told you that selling a luxury property is relatively easier than selling a normal property? Surely you would not believe me.

Well, it’s like that: it’s relatively easier. I use the word “relative” because selling luxury real estate is a specialization of real estate sales. For a specialist it is easy to sell this type of real estate; for the rest it is a challenge. Selling luxury real estate is not an ability obtained by selling other types of residential real estate; but learning from a professional who has specialized in this area. Let’s see why.

To Sell Luxury Real Estate You Should Specialize

The specialization in this type of housing with millionaire prices is necessary, because in the first place you should know how to advise the owners that sell luxury properties, which is the most difficult part of this type of sale.

Second, you must know how to prepare a luxury property before putting it on the market (and I am not referring here to home staging techniques). Thirdly, you should know what promotional material and media are the best ones to market luxury real estate; and fourth you must have contacts in the circles in which your target audience moves.

All of the above is reduced by mastering these 4 tricks of the sale of luxury real estate:

Know what you sell well

Before putting a luxury property on the market, you must know it very well. You must prepare a Dossier of the property with:

• its physical characteristics,
• legal characteristics,
• financial characteristics,
• commercial characteristics

This Dossier is the tool you need to convince the owner of the best price to sell your property, not the best exit price, but the price for which you must sell your luxury property.

A price that you will know how to defend, because in those moments, once you have completed the Dossier, you will know what the appropriate price is. A knowledge and conviction that will help you later in the negotiation with the buyer.

Preparing this type of Informative Dossier with photos and video included is not easy, it takes time, (between 2-3 weeks), and you need to have a little budget.

This Dossier is essential to be able to sell a luxury property and from it you can extract all your commercial strategy since it will tell you who is your ideal potential client, which is not precisely anyone who can afford the purchase of that property.

In every building there is always something that stands out, something totally exclusive and desirable for some. That is what will tell you who is your ideal client. Of those ideal customers there are hundreds in the market, so if you know how to create an “avatar of your customer idea ” you will sell this type of property without any problems.

Know your Target Audience

To reach your potential client you must know:

• how they tend to think,
• their needs,
• their tastes and preferences,
• life habits

You should always keep in mind that this kind of buyers are far from the ordinary and have no financing problems.

To know who is your most potential client, you must know how to transfer the characteristics of a luxury property into benefits such as prestige, belonging to a specific social group, (of those who play golf, of those who have a yacht, of those who take vacations here, etc.), social recognition, respect, privacy, exclusivity.

Doing this exercise is not easy, so you need to prepare a Sales Dossier that contains all the details and therefore it will take 2-3 weeks to prepare it. Only knowing the property well, you can write a description of the property that does justice to the property, justify its price and be attractive to that target audience.

I recommend not taking pictures or video before making this description because the description will tell you how you should take those pictures and how to record video. How to record the exclusivity that for some will have that property. Knowing how to record or take photos of exclusivity is not easy.

Generally, the location, the space available and the quality of the materials are the characteristics where you must focus to extract the benefits. Above all, extract a benefit that makes the property unique to a certain group of people.

Remember also that any luxury property once acquired will be applied small reforms to adapt to the personality of its new owners.

The needs of this type of client are different from most people and they want their new home to offer certain personal benefits that reflect the success of the potential buyers. Here the number of rooms or the price is little relevant. The important thing is that the property arrives at the feelings, that falls in love.

Promote your Luxury Property with Video

Obviously, to sell a luxury property you need top quality material and promote it in the appropriate media. A memorable description and some photos taken by a professional photographer is not enough. You need a video and record it properly. The key is in the video.

You must record the typical video of high technical quality including a person in the video that describes the property, (its features and benefits), as it is showing. That of background music while showing the different parts of the property is a waste of time for 3 reasons:

1.- the video does not generate the necessary attention. It’s boring and it does not stand out. It does not fall in love. It does not show success and exclusivity.

2.- When uploading it to YouTube you cannot optimize it, because it does not contain any text inside that you can position and that allows translation and subtitles.

3.- By not having a call to direct action, you can get many visualizations, but few requests for information.

Once you have the video hosted on YouTube or Vimeo, you need a specific landing page for this luxury property. This landing page should contain the photos, the description, the video, a query form and be very well designed. This landing page is where you are going to direct your potential clients.

Once you have all the material it is time to select the appropriate means. The best means to sell a luxury property are, in order of importance or effectiveness:

• Real Estate Public Relations,
• Google Adwords,
• Social Media (Facebook, Instagram),
• Specialized websites, (online luxury magazines and others),
• specialized real estate portals

To get quality information requests on Google and Facebook you need to know very well how to select the keywords and the target audience. For portals and specialized websites, you need to know about real estate copywriting to write memorable ads.

Use Public Relations to Sell Fast

The majority of luxury real estate and almost all super luxury real estate are sold through Real Estate Public Relations. Hence, you need to specialize and learn Real Estate Public Relations, (which is not precisely to give press conferences and write articles), to have access to the circles where your clients are.

Once you make yourself known in these circles, (and once you have sold some luxury properties), you will find that several clients, by reference or thanks to your PR efforts, entrust you with the search for a specific property.

To be successful selling luxury real estate you need to train in Real Estate Public Relations that are slightly different from Public Relations in other sectors. Doing so is part of your specialization.

I’m not saying that all the real estate agents that specialize in the sale of luxury real estate go skyrocketing their profits. But of course, to be successful in this sector you need to have good contacts and create your own personal brand. That can only be given by the Real Estate Public Relations.