How Defining Luxury Is Crucial to Competing in Today’s Crowded High-End Real Estate Marketplace

What does luxury mean? We use the word to define the finest materials, products, and brands. It connotes desirability, great worth and scarcity.

But in the real estate world, particularly in the large multi-unit skyscraper developments increasingly dominating downtowns around the world, luxury is anything but rare. According to RENTCafé, 75% of all large multi-family rental developments completed in 2015 were high-end.

However, a saturated market combined with economic and political uncertainty has already resulted in a slowdown in markets, with sluggish price growth nationally and slumps in major markets such as Manhattan, Miami, and Los Angeles.

With luxury no longer a rarity, developers need to find new ways to get their luxury units leased or sold. A well-defined brand can be one of the most important tools for doing so. But before you can define your luxury brand, you must first define what luxury means.

That’s because there’s no single standard for luxury. While luxury traditionally meant housing in the top percentile of transactions in a given market, the term has been liberally used by developers to describe everything from multimillion dollar homes to $3,000 a month apartments.

While alternate terms such as high-end, extravagant or affluent have been used to try and stand apart from luxury, the problem remains: luxury is subjective. Your idea of luxury might be chandeliers and gold faucets; mine might be stainless steel countertops and a heated pool; another’s might be ocean views and a starchitect-designed building.

When marketing a luxury development, then, it’s not enough to define your development as luxury. You need to define what luxury means to you, how it’s expressed in your development and what that means to your ideal customer.

Once you’ve defined luxury for yourself, seek ways to bring your definition to life throughout your brand. Beyond photography and a list of amenities, you can convey your definition through the endless choices to be made in color, typography, voice, content, marketing materials, and even the types of content you share on social media.

Alone, each of these elements are subtle. Together, when done correctly and consistently, they add up to a cohesive brand that signals your definition of luxury to the world. Those with a common definition of luxury will feel a clear connection to your brand and be inclined to put your development on their shortlist above the countless ill-defined competitors on the market.

In our eBook How To Differentiate a Square Foot , we show you the seven essential steps for building a luxury real estate brand that sells. By following our process, you’ll be well on the way to creating your definition of luxury and communicating it to your audience. Download the eBook now.

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