Unique Approaches to Marketing

Robin Blass, a top-producing sales associate with Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage in Dunwoody, sold 87 homes in 2013 for a sales volume of more than $36 million, and she credits her fundamental approach to marketing – including an emphasis on old-school print marketing – as one reason for her continued to success.

“I do a ton of Internet marketing, but I also do hard copy advertising,” she says. “It works. When I go into my listings, there are plenty of older people who do not use the Internet,  and there are so many times that I will go into someone’s kitchen and my card or my ad will be on their refrigerator.”

That approach, of a consumer-minded marketing approach, is also integral to the real estate business of Weslee Knapp, the owner of Keller Knapp Realty.

“I take a different approach than the average person,” says Knapp, who’s personal 2013 sales volume of $36.5 million was part of a larger office volume of $137 million. “I believe that every property is different, and you have to understand who the buyer is for that property and attach the marketing efforts to that particular subset of consumers.”

So a high-end home, Knapp explains, will have different marketing materials than an entry-level property, just as an entry-level property will have marketing strategies that differ from an investment property. One recent example, Knapp says, involved a condo he was selling in Emory University. Rather than list the property universally on syndication sites, Knapp focused on student-centric outlets, such as Emory University message boards.

And for Chad Polazzo, a real estate consultant with RE/MAX Metro Atlanta Cityside, marketing becomes an extension of who he is as an agent and as a person.

“My marketing is not as slick and glossy and produced as a lot of my competitors, and I certainly have lost out on jobs because of that – there’s a certain clientele that really looks for that, particularly in the higher price points,” says Polazzo, who had a sales volume of more than $36 million last year and has been his office’s top agent the last five years. “But I don’t want to be the slick wheeler-dealer agent … that’s how I prefer it, because I remember, back before I was an agent, that I would go to an open house and just cringe at the whole salesy, pushy desperateness of the agents and the cheesy, glossy marketing. There’s a lot of smoke and mirrors in the business, and I just don’t care about that.”