Ryan Starr – Yourhome​.ca

As Toronto’s top real estate adver­tis­ing and mar­ket­ing exec­u­tives gath­ered recently for a round­table dis­cus­sion on the state of their indus­try, the out­look was a fair bit rosier than it was one year ago. Small won­der: The city’s real estate mar­ket expe­ri­enced a remark­able resur­gence in the sec­ond half of 2009, one that made the eco­nomic down­turn seem almost like a dis­tant memory.

The Toronto Real Estate Board reported a total of 87,308 sales of homes last year, beat­ing the 74,552 sales made in 2008. In Decem­ber alone there were 5,541 sales, up 115% from the same period a year earlier.

Con­fi­dence has made a come­back, the Toronto Star-sponsored round­table agreed.

“There’s a cau­tious opti­mism out there,” said Linda O’Connor, vice-president and man­ag­ing direc­tor of Ryan Design Inc.

“Pur­chasers real­ized that the world didn’t end,” added L.A. Inc. vice-president David Klugsberg.

Things have changed, though, the par­tic­i­pants said.

For one thing, pur­chasers who have been wad­ing into the waters in the past six months are a warier and wiser lot.

“These buy­ers are mak­ing edu­cated deci­sions,” said Sha­keel Walji, a part­ner and cre­ative direc­tor for The Walsh Group. “They’re vis­it­ing more sales offices before they pull the trigger.

“When the mar­ket rebounded, they had already done their home­work. They knew the neigh­bour­hood where they wanted to be, and they said let’s make the deci­sion now.”

Buy­ers have been coaxed back in large part by rock-bottom inter­est rates.

“The cur­rent inter­est rate envi­ron­ment has been a real cat­a­lyst,” O’Connor said. “If rates had moved up a cou­ple of points, we’d all be sit­ting around like the May­tag repairman.”

Pur­chasers are also being lured by the prospect of get­ting great bar­gains, she noted.

“We’ve seen a lot of builders reduc­ing prices for inven­tory. And con­sumers are think­ing there are deals out there; that there’s an oppor­tu­nity to ask for a lit­tle bit more.

“I don’t think a con­sumer has walked into a sales office this year with­out expect­ing some kind of deal,” O’Connor said.

To make those deals work, how­ever, builders are hav­ing to tweak the size of the suites; essen­tially offer­ing less for less.

“Peo­ple are look­ing for a cer­tain price point and to attain that devel­op­ers are mak­ing units smaller.”

The grow­ing num­ber of savvy home­buy­ers out there these days means that it’s as impor­tant as ever for mar­ket­ing strate­gies to hit the mark, pan­el­lists said.

With this in mind, the sales cen­tre has under­gone a sig­nif­i­cant transformation.

“We used to design sales offices for con­sumers to come in and view prod­uct and write up a deal,” O’Connor said. “Now we design them for peo­ple to come in and lounge.

“We have bars and we even held a sum­mer camp in a sales office last sum­mer (at Heath­wood Homes’ Tra­di­tions devel­op­ment in Mil­ton, where the sales cen­tre dou­bles as a com­mu­nity centre).

“We’re cre­at­ing envi­ron­ments that are geared toward much more than just sell­ing prod­uct and get­ting the con­sumer out the door,” O’Connor added. “What we’re design­ing now are venues.”

Real estate mar­keters say it’s equally as vital that they take full advan­tage of new tech­nolo­gies to entice poten­tial buyers.

Touch screens at sales cen­tres, for exam­ple, are becom­ing essen­tial tools to help home­buy­ers envi­sion a poten­tial liv­ing space.

Such tech­nol­ogy rep­re­sents a vast improve­ment over the old-school one-dimensional ren­der­ings and floor plans sales­peo­ple relied on in the past to illus­trate offerings.

“We used to have dis­play boards all over the place and we’d take the (prospec­tive buyer) through a jour­ney … they’d walk around with us,” said Clarence Poirier, cre­ative direc­tor for P&B Mar­ket­ing Ltd.

“But with touch screens, the cus­tomer never has to leave the mon­i­tor to under­stand every­thing about a project … and the sales­per­son can change things instantly to incor­po­rate a consumer’s request, as opposed to say­ing, ‘We’ll have to get back to you.’

“Touch screens have made it a hun­dred times more efficient.”

O’Connor agreed. “I don’t think there’s a sales office we’re design­ing right now that doesn’t have a touch screen in it,” she said.

At the sales cen­tre for Aura at Col­lege Park – a 75-storey condo that will be the tallest in North Amer­ica when it’s com­pleted in 2012 – O’Connor’s team has added Google Earth to fur­ther enhance the touch screen experience.

“You can fly over and see the build­ing pop up in the mid­dle of Toronto,” she said. “Or you can click on any­thing in the sur­round­ing area and it will tell you that you’re, for exam­ple, three kilo­me­tres from the ROM.”

“And if (a prospec­tive buyer) wants to live on the 29^th floor and face south­east and asks ‘What would my view be?’ They can just click and it’s there – it’s instant.”

Ryan Design has gone a step fur­ther in its adop­tion of new tech­nolo­gies to sell con­dos.

The firm is pio­neer­ing the use of what’s known as “Blue­tooth prox­im­ity mar­ket­ing,” which they’ve employed for Blade in Bramp­ton, a 26-storey condo that is across the street from a GO Tran­sit station.

To tar­get on-the-move com­muters, equip­ment housed in a sales cen­tre sends out mar­ket­ing mes­sages and spe­cial offers to Bluetooth-enabled devices within a range of sev­eral hun­dred feet.

“Peo­ple in this indus­try used to think, ‘If I have a web­site I’m okay,’” O’Connor said. “But these days it’s about how you’re get­ting your mes­sage out to the con­sumer … and every con­sumer is car­ry­ing a cell­phone or a BlackBerry.

“So we’re incor­po­rat­ing tech­nol­ogy to deliver mobile infor­ma­tion to poten­tial purchasers.”

Tech­nol­ogy can be a double-edged sword, though, par­tic­u­larly when it comes to how social media can influ­ence would-be buyers.

The real estate mar­ket­ing indus­try used to enjoy total con­trol over the mes­sage, said round­table mod­er­a­tor Danny Roth, who heads the PR firm Bran­don Com­mu­ni­ca­tions. But nowa­days they’re com­pet­ing with blog­gers, as well as Twit­ter and Face­book, forums in which one person’s sour com­ment about a project can poten­tially have as much influ­ence as a full-page ad in the news­pa­per or a spot on the radio.

Do these mar­ket­ing gurus see this as a threat? Roth asked.

Walji said it’s the exact oppo­site for his firm; they embrace social media and incor­po­rate it into their mar­ket­ing mix.

“We include Face­book and Twit­ter in our strat­egy,” he said. “We want to get as many peo­ple aware of a project as pos­si­ble – that’s the whole idea. The mes­sage you try and get out is pos­i­tive, and hope­fully it’s going to the right audience.”

But he acknowl­edges, “it is dif­fi­cult to con­trol what peo­ple do with it after it gets out.”

That said, in the super-competitive real estate indus­try, chat­ter about a rival firm can come in handy.

“The blo­gos­phere helps us to track com­peti­tors,” O’Connor said.

The new year looks to be a brighter one for Toronto real estate, leav­ing the tur­moil of 2009 firmly in the past, or so the pan­el­lists of the round­table, held in a board­room at the Toronto Star, hope.

But did the chaotic past year have any sig­nif­i­cant last­ing impact?

“I don’t think Toronto was the root of the prob­lem by any means, but it cer­tainly affected us,” said Klugsberg.

“We’re doing busi­ness with a lot less peo­ple than we were last year at this time,” said Joe Latobesi, vice-president of Mon­tana Steele Adver­tis­ing Inc., which recently won a record nine gold awards at the National Sales and Mar­ket­ing Awards in Las Vegas.

“It did weed out some of these wannabe builders. And the tougher things got, the more that shops like ours that have been around for years got called.”

In the end, though, Latobesi thinks Toronto’s rapid real estate resur­gence is evi­dence of an oth­er­wise healthy mar­ket that was wait­ing for the chance to fire back up.

“Every­one was expect­ing some­thing to hap­pen to the hous­ing mar­ket here (dur­ing the down­turn),” he said. “But then noth­ing did, and we just jumped back on where we were.”

“We have had so much con­fi­dence in the GTA mar­ket over the last three to six months,” added Poirier. “In com­par­i­son to the rest of the world, it’s overwhelming.

————————————————————————————————————–

Con­tact the Jef­frey Team for more infor­ma­tion  -  416−388−1960

————————————————————————————————————–

Related posts:

1. Toronto Real Estate Fore­cast 2010 MLS® sales in the GTA will hit a record high…
2. Real estate deep freeze now hot thaw Sales in May and early June have out­done May and…
3. 2010 Toronto real estate trends When it comes to the Toronto condo mar­ket in 2010,…
4. Toronto real estate sees more list­ings in 2010 It is impor­tant to look back on the events that…
5. Real estate sales rocket to record lev­els The Toronto real estate mar­ket has fol­lowed a record-breaking June…