Influencers Marketing Condos? Some Developers Counting On It
Amid the pandemic and the slowdown in the New York market, some developers are hoping influencers with thousands of followers will help them market homes and condos.
As Bloomberg first reported, agents and developers alike hope that young and popular Instagram influencers will help promote certain newly built condos in the city – a type of property that, given the suburban migration that has occurred among them, March saw the richest residents of the city decline in interest. In the third quarter, Manhattan home sales declined 46 percent compared to 2019, while sales in nearby counties like Westchester rose 56 percent.
One solution for developers looking to sell urban real estate was to reach out to the influencers. Christine Blackburn, Compass sales director, hired influencers like Summer Rayne Oakes – who gained her 213,000+ followers by showing how to care for and decorate plants – to create a condominium at 111 Montgomery, Brooklyn’s Crown Heights.
The 447-square-foot studio was listed for $ 499,000 and Oakes was given a $ 5,000 budget to make it pop and create an atmosphere that would make it appealing to followers.
“I wanted the room to feel really inhabited, not like something out of a catalog,” Oakes told Bloomberg.
She decorated the apartment with furniture and accents from trendy stores like Anthropologie, Plant Stores, and Thrift Stores. A YouTube video Oakes posted of the apartment received over 450,000 views (the Instagram post shared in July currently has 3,363 likes). The details of how much Oakes was paid for such a grant are withheld by the developers, CIM Group and LIVWRK.
At the same time, during the pandemic, many young adults are spending more time on social media looking for ways to improve their homes while working remotely. Comments like “OMG! You did that? ”And“ The living room looks really nice ”flooded in seconds after Oakes posted it to her account.
“It’s just about creating an atmosphere,” Blackburn told Bloomberg, adding that the partnership was “super effective,” although the developers did not say how many units were sold due to Oakes’ involvement.
Another Manhattan developer, Park Loggia, hired influencers Hunter Vought and Adam Gonon to promote condos in the Upper West Side starting at $ 1.4 million. The couple run a joint Instagram account called Gentleman’s Creative, in which they present men’s fashion and “classy” lifestyles – everything from suits and watches to cars and expensive hotels.
The couple showed off elements of the apartment including a balcony with city views while wearing their signature suits, sweaters and watches on the account, which has nearly 300,000 followers.
“For us, it’s not just a brand, we were also able to highlight the outdoor space that people can use, especially during the pandemic,” Vought told Bloomberg. “We stayed true to ourselves and made it our own – our followers are interested in that.”
As a relatively new marketing technique, not enough numbers are issued to show how often viewing a home on Instagram or YouTube leads to a direct sale – most buyers, especially older ones, still find homes through targeted searches on sites like Zillow.
But, as a March poll by the National Association of Realtors found, Generation Z and millennials under 29 were most likely to make home buying decisions based on advice from someone they trust, and for many that includes their favorite influencers.
“We see that social media has played a pretty big role in home shopping,” StreetEasy economist Nancy Wu told Bloomberg.
Influencer marketing strategy can be a particularly good idea for certain cities and properties, such as urban condos – another StreetEasy study found that 61 percent of all buyers in New York are first-time buyers. For single family homes, this can be an expensive strategy that doesn’t necessarily lead to sales.
Thomas Fialo, vice president at Douglas Elliman Development Marketing, partnered with fashion influencers like Sai De Silva and Sophia Visanji to promote the Quay Tower condominium building in Brooklyn Bridge Park and saw a surge in visits to the Instagram page Building by 600 to 700 percent and increasing visits to its website by 500 percent.
Whether these views lead to sales often remains to be seen later, but for many developers this is a strategy for starting the conversation about a specific building or condo.
Email to Veronika Bondarenko