Imagine you walked into Louis Vuitton, and their iconic handbag was sitting on a McDonald’s table. Would you pay $5,000 for it? Of course not. Why? Because you would question what makes it so valuable. When you put your apartment on the market, you should ask yourself: What can I do to position my apartment so that people automatically think of it as a luxury product, something they want to pay a substantial amount of money for? On the simplest level, if you take a five-dollar photo of your apartment, don’t expect someone to pay top dollar for the place. After all, if you thought it was worth a lot, why would you disrespect it with cheap marketing and advertising?
Luxury brands have several things in common. Luxury is all about crafting experiences, cultivating emotion, and exuding passion. Building a luxury brand requires spending a great deal of time focusing on influencing a buyer’s mood. Should the brand make people happy, excited, calm, feel superior, or feel hungry for more? If you go into a luxury store, you will feel uplifted before you even see the product. Luxury brands make sure the salespeople speak to you in a certain way. They make sure the lighting is just right, and they make the display case itself a masterpiece, so that the product is displayed on a throne.
Context is everything. You must create an aura. If you met the president on the street and didn’t know he was the president, you probably wouldn’t be excited. Now add the secret service, hundreds of patrol cars, paparazzi, and people swarming around him trying to just get his attention, and you will be enamored. Property can be marketed the same way. You have to make sure that everything inside and around the property is thought out. When you stage the apartment, you have to respect the space. If the apartment was the president, would you put a dirty suit on him and expect people to love and respect him? No, and the same goes for your home. Keep it in pristine showing condition at all times.
Your agents who are showing the apartment should respect the space as well, and view the entire process of buying and selling an apartment as a very romantic and respectable endeavor.
Don’t forget: this is the American dream. Owning a home brings stability to your life, economic prosperity, and a sense of pride. Buying an apartment isn’t easy and it can be a scary time. The allure of luxury is designed to heavily influence a buyer’s uncertainty about making the right purchase. Of course it’s worth it, Luxury will say. It’s a Louis Vuitton.
Luxury brands craft a message. They find out what people love most about their product and obsess over sharing the experience. When an apartment has a good view, the marketing should obsess over it. When a broker speaks to a client, the broker should stand with their back to the windows, so that the client encounters the view and experiences its beauty for themselves.
Luxury brands focus on rigorously consistent messaging. The same message, the same tone, throughout the whole process. In real estate, this often rotates around conversations where we discuss how someone can envision their life in the apartment. The conversation is all about the buyer living in the home, not the current owners. We want to inspire, excite, and share the beautiful possibilities of a new home — that is the luxury real estate experience.