I’ve written about the Coffee Table Books we make for some of our listings, and I talked about them briefly at BloodhoundBlog Unchained. I wanted to go into the idea in greater detail, because I think this is a case where, if you don’t understand all of our thinking, you could easily miss the big picture by focusing on the pixels.
Cathleen Collins invented the idea of doing Coffee Table Books for listings. She knew what we wanted, and then she searched the internet to find a way to do it. (We use Apple’s iPhoto, but you get get similar products from Shutterfly. H/T Cheryl Johnson.) We’re not always this lucky. We knew what we wanted in custom yard signs years before we were able to find a vendor who could do it.
To understand our marketing objectives, we need to start at the top. A Coffee Table Book is an objet d’art. It is only secondarily a book. It is primarily a statement about the subject of that book. By its nature, a Coffee Table Book says, “This is important. This is no mere casual, ordinary thing. This is an object or event that deserves to be heralded, celebrated, honored.” That’s why these books can only work for certain homes, and, why, incidentally, I think it’s a mistake to violate the format. If you turn your Coffee Table Book into a hard-cover version of the kind of comb-bound listing books produced by title companies, you cheapen your impact — possibly to the point of anti-marketing — and frustrate your objectives.
So the sine qua non of a BloodhoundRealty.com Coffee Table Book is an exceptional home. The book says, “This home is extraordinary,” so the home has to be extraordinary enough to justify the existence of the book.
And this comes back to the knock-their-socks-off idea of marketing a listing. The Coffee Table Book expresses your total commitment to your sellers, and it makes the same kind of impression on potential buyers. A Coffee Table Book will not paper over the defects in an ugly, dirty, decrepit home, but it will make your listing stand way out from its competitors. “No other home we’ve seen has its own Coffee Table Book. This one must really be better.” If buyers said something like that out loud, they would understand it as a non sequitur. But the little things you do for your listings, such as a Coffee Table Book, communicate with the heart, not the head. All of those little touches — and everything matters — speak subconsciously about the quality and value of the home.
The Virtual Coffee Table Book on the single-property web site, does similar but different jobs. For one thing, it’s still more stickiness, to keep buyers on our site, looking at our listing and not someone else’s listings. The existence and the look and feel of the book communicate some of the same ideas about quality and value as the real Coffee Table Book, but, of course, not with the same visceral impact. But the Virtual Coffee Table Book permits the buyer to share a collection of stunning photographs of the home with friends and family members — a commitment to action which can translate to a commitment to buy the home.
These are all very important marketing objectives, and they all come from doing a true Coffee Table Book, using the best and most stunningly dramatic photos you can obtain of the home. It’s not just a book, it’s a statement, a unique and arresting statement about this one particular home — which sets itself apart from all other homes by its having its own Coffee Table Book. This is one of those ideas that communicates valuable marketing information at every conceivable level.
(There’s more: We normally print three books. One for the sellers, one for the buyers, one for the house. We keep the house’s copy after Close of Escrow to use in future listing presentations. We give the sellers their copy to remember us by — and to induce referrals. We give the buyers their copy after COE — this as a way of pointing out who they should use as listers when they’re ready to move on. Anti-marketing is worse than no marketing, but good marketing should work on every level — in perpetuity.)
But: You have to think your way through all those levels to realize and reap — and not ruin — those benefits. So here’s a little marketing quiz:
When we prepare a printed Coffee Table Book for a home we have listed, it will be placed on the coffee table, right by the sofa, in the living room or the greatroom. There won’t be any other books there, nor any other staging items to distract attention from the book. It will be opened to display two pages of the most dramatic photos.
The question: What is our marketing objective in doing this?
I’ll send something nice to the first person to get the right answer.
Technorati Tags: BloodhoundBlog Unchained, real estate, real estate marketing, real estate photography, real estate training
Dave Barnes says:
To get prospects to pick up the book and spend time perusing it.
Then they will have spent more time looking at great photos and less time thinking about defects in the actual property.
June 24, 2008 — 11:48 am
Michael Rahmn says:
To get them to sit down in the living room and spend time relaxing, visualizing the experience of living there.
June 24, 2008 — 12:31 pm
Todd says:
Additional resource for printing is Blurb:
http://www.blurb.com/learn_more/books
Which connects to your Flickr, Picasa, or SmugMug account and prints the photos you select to be made into a very high quality book. Kind of expensive, but nice. They also have a local client you install on Mac or PC.
June 24, 2008 — 12:33 pm
David Sherfey says:
It subtly substantiates the value of the home. It will stick in the mind of the interested buyer enough for them to go to the home’s website later on if they haven’t seen it already.
A buyer who stops to look at the book, even though they are inside the house, indicates to a showing agent they may be more than just casually interested in the property.
Just for fun, seller voyeurism: The seller and/or listing agent may be able to tell that the buyer is interested because a different page may be up or the book closed following a showing, if they care to check.
June 24, 2008 — 12:39 pm
Greg Swann says:
> To get them to sit down in the living room and spend time relaxing, visualizing the experience of living there.
Exactly right. It seems like a minor thing, but the idea of “making yourself at home” is very powerful. The Coffee Table Book is staged the way it is to induce people to sit down and look at it, thus to get a feel for how the home “fits” them. Direct marketing at its most direct.
Send me your snailmail address and I’ll ship out your fabulous prize.
June 24, 2008 — 1:19 pm
Cathleen Collins says:
Thank you for the recommendation, Todd. The price is similar to iBooks, but Blurb looks like it will give me a lot more versatility. We do a lot for our listings, but none of it is rote. Our processes are all about marketing a specific house, to find a specific buyer. So having choices in marketing materials is really valuable. I’ll let you know how Blurb works out once I’ve had a chance to play with it.
June 24, 2008 — 1:42 pm
Tom Vanderwell says:
I didn’t get a chance to answer in time, but I do have to say that after looking through the virtual coffee table book, I am really impressed. It was almost enough to want to make me move!
Keep pushing Greg, it makes a difference!
Tom
June 24, 2008 — 5:20 pm
Brad Coy says:
This is brilliant!! Being as I generally sell condos I have tried something similar with a book on the neighborhood. Neighborhoods in the city are very important. Anything to get people to spend more than 10 minutes at the open. Most of the time, people are just in and OUT.
I’m definitely putting this to work in some of the single family homes we do in the city and in Marin. Thanks!
btw – It looks like some of those are your own photos. Did you take them all, or are you hiring the work out to “pros”.
June 24, 2008 — 11:25 pm
Greg Swann says:
> It looks like some of those are your own photos. Did you take them all, or are you hiring the work out to “pros”.
We use a pro for the photos used in our Obeo tours, but he takes maybe 10 or 15 shots. We take hundreds more, and most of the photos in the Coffee Table Book will have been taken by Cathleen. She has become an amazing photographer, and for the past two years she’s done most of our listing photos, and all of our truly stunning photos.
June 25, 2008 — 12:12 am
Brad Coy says:
Bravo Cathleen! 🙂
June 25, 2008 — 12:33 am
Jim Rake says:
Good marketing tool – now, can we get those pics in 3D along with the special glasses? Seriously, exceptional homes need something…well, something exceptional, and it looks like the Coffee Table Book fills that need. As you’ve intimated, it, along with the additional marketing tools add that little extra to showcase the property. We like iPhoto, but will certainly be taking a look at what Blurb can provide. While blogs fill alot of needs, their educational value is second to none.
June 25, 2008 — 9:30 am