If you want to sell a luxury home, then you should exclusively be using a luxury real estate agent to help you list and sell.
There are many cases where you’ll see a general real estate agent list a million-dollar estate deploying the same marketing methods used on lower-end residential homes, putting the same for sale sign up, and waiting for a phone call.
This happens way more than it should.
There’s a reason luxury real estate agents like myself exist. We specialize in selling luxury houses.
Keyword. Specialize.
We do it better than anyone else.
In this article, we’ll discuss the reasons why you should only be hiring luxury real estate agents to sell your luxury homes.
Luxury Real Estate Agents Generally Have Higher Budgets
I’m not saying luxury agents are more successful than general agents.
What I am saying is that luxury real estate agents specifically budget more money to go into operations like marketing, technology, and other overhead expenses.
The higher the sale price, the more expensive it is to sell.
This is good news for a luxury homeowner. Instead of having an agent with a low budget that can’t market your home the way it needs to be marketed, you have a luxury agent to serve your best interest and amplify the amount of visibility your home receives.
Marketing is More Expensive in Luxury Real Estate
Luxury sales require very specific targeting. A very small percentage of individuals are capable of making luxury home purchases.
The job of a luxury real estate agent is to market in a way that brings those buyers forward, but it’s not cheap, and certainly not easy.
I’ve said it time and time again, video marketing is an absolute must in luxury real estate sales this day and age. But just like everything else, it costs money and time.
Getting the right equipment, shooting the video, editing the video, posting the video, and perhaps starting a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign on social media to get more reach is all very time consuming and can rack up expenses.
But a good luxury real estate agent budgets for that, knowing that it’s an important piece of the listing process.
A general agent may not, and if they do, is the video quality good? Is there a good script? Do they understand the nature of luxury lifestyles?
We haven’t even factored in the potential staging costs, images, and direct mail campaign, which can cost thousands of dollars all together.
Luxury agents are prepared for these expenses which makes the life of a client less stressful.
In my opinion, there are five essentials a luxury real estate agent should have in their marketing plan if they want to succeed in luxury sales. All can be very expensive. It’s important to understand that in choosing your agent.
Luxury Real Estate Agents Have In-Depth Knowledge of Luxury Homes
Typically, if a professional declares a specialty in a field, then they have a ton of information stored in their brain about it.
This is no different for professional luxury agents.
We learn everything we need to learn about luxury homes, sales, and whatever else floats into the category.
Architecture and Interior Design
Luxury real estate is about selling lifestyles, not homes. The best way to sell a lifestyle is to understand how that life can be designed.
A luxury real estate agent that educates themselves in interior design and architecture make themselves better at sales.
Instead of walking into a space and seeing the same thing a client sees. They have the upper hand.
They can feel the flow of each room, how the design creates a certain ambiance, how it can be changed to better fit their clients, all of which may result in a sale.
Pricing
A luxury real estate agent is submerged in the luxury market. They pay attention to luxury sales and only luxury sales. They see every home, every price, every sale, and every expired listing on a daily basis.
They are in a much better position to assist you in pricing your luxury home versus a standard agent.
Typical practice among most real estate agents is to look at the relevant sales data in the surrounding area and gather a list of comparable properties to create a price point.
This isn’t bad practice in general real estate, in fact, it’s good practice.
But luxury real estate is in a whole other galaxy.
Most subdivisions are built in cookie-cutter layouts with maybe three to four models of houses in each.
That means that we always know what the listing price of the house will be because the same exact house sold for $300,000 down the street. It’s pretty difficult to justify a higher price.
In luxury sales, the vast majority of homes are custom-built, and if they aren’t, they’ve been customized so much over time that they might as well be.
Therefore, no price point fits all. It’s up to the luxury agent to identify and determine how much value the features, layout, and design of the home offer, and communicate that with the seller.
This is not an easy process for a luxury real estate agent, as it takes time and dedication to the craft to become proficient at pricing.
Luxury Agents are usually Apart of Large Organizations
Luxury real estate agents are sort of this elite band of agents where they have special organizations for just luxury agents that offer designations to make us look better for our clients.
This is definitely a bonus for luxury clients since often these membership organizations offer training and a large network for increased visibility of your home.
Some of the more prominent organizations are the Institute for Luxury Home Marketing (ILHM) and Who’s Who in Luxury Real Estate.
Of course, this can help increase the likelihood of your home getting sold, plus, your agent has special training that other real estate agents can’t get since most memberships require a certain number of sales per year in the luxury real estate market.
Final Thoughts
Between higher costs and deliberate marketing, deep knowledge of luxury real estate, and the elite level of service a luxury real estate agent can provide, there should be no reason that you don’t hire a luxury agent if you reside in a high-end property.
If you live in Asheville or Charlotte, North Carolina, feel free to contact me if you need a luxury real estate agent.
Berri Luxury Properties will be expanding to cover the rest of North Carolina and eventually outside of the state in the future so stay tuned.
