Real Estate Marketing goes Up Market in Perth

The traditional marketing tools of the trade for an Australian real estate agent is a hammer: to help secure the large billboard outside the property. If its an expensive property this used to mean that the sign was bigger, with more pictures: some of the pictures might even feature the property for sale rather than the friendly face of the agent involved. More than one property owner has wondered why so much of the advertising that they often pay for involved the agent, their family, their agency, their dog, in fact anything else but the actually thing that was being sold: their home!

Now their are signs that Australian property marketing has grown up a little and following overseas trends. Instead of tossing the sign up out front and opening the property for viewing for an hour or two on the weekends

To promote their new Allegro development, Mirvac has built a $1.3 million display apartment above Burswood Park Golf Course and convinced 80 prospective buyers and media to inspect the pad. All those present were witness to a domestic drama as a handsome young executiv, Bob, show’s off his slick new apartment, his parentts gasp and gush as they gaze out through floor-to-ceiling windows to the Burswood golf course, the Swan River and the lights of Perth’s CBD. Bob chats with his girlfriend, Carol as she passes him on the way to the kitchen. Later however Bob appears to have forgotten his girlfriend when he seduces another women in the grand master suite.
It is all of course an act: Bob, Carol, his parents and the other women are all actors. Mirvac are very happy with the launch. Mirvac’s West Australian chief executive officer, Evan Campbell says:

the audience was enthralled. “It was good from our point of view because it was an unusual way to showcase the lifestyle and it incorporated two generations of potential buyers – Generation X and their baby boomer parents,” he says. “It’s true the girls in the audience loved the guy, and the guys loved the girl.”

When the first 45 apartments went on sale last December, all were sold on the first weekend for an average $1.2 million.

Pantomimes aren’t all that’s happening with marketing at the top end of the Australian property market though. DVD’s are become de rigeur for the more sophisticated buyers and the probably more pressed sellers. The tactic of course is to sell the lifestyle not just the apartment. Apartment living is still relatively rare in Australia: particularly in Perth which has an average population density closer to that of LA than that of New York city! Perth has it’s share of traffic problems partly because of the pretty Swan River which splits the city in tour. Also partly because the infrastructure of road and commuter rail has just not kept up with the speed of population boom in the West which is driven by the huge Australian resource boom

Photo credit: lissie