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 Read more
