Agents Try New Tricks to Entice Home Buyers

?Tis the season to be creative
?Tis the season to be creative

RISMEDIA, December 11, 2006?(MCT)?As the national and local housing market remains sluggish, builders and real estate agents are getting creative when it comes to attracting potential buyers in a slow market.

“Since the houses aren’t selling themselves, it behooves the people surrounding the marketing of them to become focused,” said Linda Hodge of Preferred Properties’ Greenwich, Connecticut office.

The slowdown is a particular conundrum within the new-construction and higher-end markets, said Melanie Healey, a partner with Stamford-based Newbridge International Realty.

Eighteen months ago, new construction awaiting a buyer was an anomaly in the area; those homes sold overnight. Today, they could sit unoccupied for a year or more, she said.

“It’s the one area that I think is suffering the most,” Healey said.

In an attempt to attract attention to these homes?most of which are on the market for well over $1 million?builders are offering incentives to try to pique potential buyers’ interests. And real estate agents are thinking outside of the box when it comes to attracting people to open houses.

Charged with selling seven new homes at a luxury development in Norwalk, Connecticut, Healey’s firm hosted a twilight open house holiday party.

“There are a lot more homes to choose from, so the idea is how do we get the home in the forefront,” she said.

Instead of a traditional weekend open house, Healey hosted a party with a roaring fire in the fireplace, candle-lit rooms, holiday decorations, music, food and drinks.

The party revealed how the home looks at night and how the floor plan flows with people in it, she said.

Invited guests were not just potential buyers, but were other real estate agents, neighbors, real estate lawyers, and past and present clients.

The hope is that they will spread the word about the development, Healey said.

The idea has worked for Newbridge International before, she said. This summer, the firm hosted a party at a new home in Darien that had been on the market for about a year with another real estate agency.

The party emphasized the home’s impressive front porch and backyard. It sold three weeks later.

“We realized that kind of exposure got people excited about a house in a different way,” Healey said.

It’s not just agents that are thinking differently in this market.

“Most builders are being very open-minded and are looking to be creative, which is much different than what we saw in the past few years,” said Stamford real estate agent Jim Troy, who hosts a weekly real estate radio program on WSTC-AM and WNLK-AM.

“Most of these builders would rather not hang on to their properties; they’d rather cash out.”

Over the past year, Troy said he’s seen builders offer free landscaping services for a year or to paint homes in any color the buyer wants.

Builders also buy down points on a mortgage to make the monthly mortgage payments lower.

Some builders have even offered to take someone’s existing home and apply it to the cost of the new home?similar to trading in a used car for a new one, he said.

This week, River Oaks in Stamford began offering a “signature home collection,” said Karen Kline, the luxury housing development’s vice president of sales and marketing.

Those homes are available for quicker occupancy and offer design features that are normally considered upgrades at no additional costs to buyers, she said.

Nancy Hadden, a real estate agent with William Raveis International’s Stamford office, said in her experience some giveaways don’t work.

People buy a home because it meets their needs, she said. “If I’m buying a $2 million house, do I really care if I get a free weekend in the Bahamas?”

But that doesn’t mean that Hadden isn’t creative.

She recently sold a $2 million home with the help of some of her own possessions.

“Big, new construction can look a little cold,” she said. With that in mind, she put some of her own glassware in cabinets, beautiful items on the kitchen countertops and appropriately colored towels in each of the bathrooms.

She even went as far as putting an antique dresser that she had just purchased for her own home in one of the large powder rooms.

Hadden said she is also casting her net wider. If she has a listing in Stamford, instead of hosting open houses for brokers only in Stamford she will invite brokers from surrounding towns such as Greenwich and New Canaan.

While there are some innovative real estate agents working hard to market homes, Troy believes a lot of real estate companies make a mistake by cutting back on marketing and advertising.

“It’s getting tougher and tougher to the get the advertising for their clients,” he said. “Companies are trying to cut back because they are anticipating a severe slowdown.”

Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business.