Inside Third & Bond: Week 129

Open houses are a tremendous source of data, both numerical and anecdotal. None of the data would pass an intro to statistics student’s muster but it provides useful information to us nonetheless. We don’t need high falutin’ standard deviations or t-tests to get at the headlines. If we were selling thousands of homes across the country like a suburban developer, maybe it would pay to run more precise studies but for our purposes it isn’t worth the time or money.
The things we most need to know are simple:
– What neighborhoods are buyers coming from
– How did they find out about us
– What kind of unit do buyers want
– What’s their reaction to the project
This list isn’t all inclusive of the data we need for a successful project we need to know a lot more about demographics of the neighborhood, trends in the residential market, and such, but this list represents the most crucial information that we glean from open houses.

What neighborhoods are buyers from?
We need to know where to focus our advertising. Should we rent a subway kiosk in Chelsea or Brooklyn Heights? Should we have the NY Times on-line ads target Park Slope or Red Hook, or both? If we notice a preponderance of people coming from particular neighborhoods, we look at what their neighborhoods have and don’t have. If we get a lot of people coming from Clinton Hill, then we might not only target it for more advertising but also spiff up our ad to remark on how convenient the F train is to take to Manhattan (only 3 stops) from Third + Bond.

Eighty percent of our open house visitors are from Brooklyn with the last twenty from Manhattan neighborhoods like the Upper West Side and East Village. From Brooklyn we have a heavy dose of people from Carroll Gardens/Boerum Hill/Cobble Hill. Makes sense that people who live in the neighborhood and want to upgrade would look to live in the same area. Also makes sense that non-committal lookers out for a stroll on a Sunday afternoon would pop in. We don’t mind. The next biggest bunch is from Park Slope. The rest are from a scattering of the expected: Brooklyn Heights, Downtown Brooklyn, etc.

Although five or ten years ago we would have done heavy advertising in Manhattan to draw buyers who were out-priced there, now the Brooklyn market stands firmly on its own. This impression of ours seems borne out by our open house stats.

How did they find out about us?
This question goes hand-in-hand with the geography of buyers. If one source seems more fruitful than another, then we’ll shift our advertising dollars. Why spend $1,500 on an ad that nobody looks at? For another of our projects, Oceanview Villas II (1 family, 3-bed home for $330k), there are a few stragglers yet to sell and so we experimented broadly. We always advertise in The Chief, the newspaper of civil employees, but we extended to The Wave (Rockaway newspaper), Queens Tribune, Caribbean Life, Airport Express (JFK newsletter), New York Teacher (union newsletter), MTA buses, Google ad words and even the Urdu Times—in Urdu! After all of that, the people coming to the open houses only cited The Chief, often waving the clipped ad as they did it.

For Third + Bond, we have been advertising on-line about as much as in print. We spend money on the NY Times Classified page as well as on-line ads in the Real Estate section. We do Brownstoner, Curbed, and Facebook. We are looking at doing posters in the Borough Hall subway station and we have talked about hiring B-list celebrities to walk naked under sandwich boards around the Prospect Park Farmers’ Market. Just kidding.

But given our ad spots, which number around 12-15, we have found that 6 sources rise to the top: NY Times, Corcoran website, Third + Bond website, Brownstoner ads, brokers, and a mysterious category of Internet Other. This category illustrates the greatest challenge of collecting data at the open house. People fill out the sign-in sheet but they aren’t necessarily giving us an accurate or thoughtful answer. Oh, yeah, I think maybe I saw something about it someplace on the internet. Gee, thanks. Still, we know there are print ads that aren’t doing much of anything for us so we can reallocate our dollars to someplace on the internet.

What kind of unit do they want?
If you’ve been to the contact page on the Third + Bond website, then you know we ask you to tell us what size of a unit you want. The brokers use this information to prep for meeting with buyers. We use it to get a sense of what type of unit are in highest demand. In past projects, like at J Condo, we considered changing floor plans to create more of a unit type in higher demand. Knowing which units are highly desired and which aren’t also helps with our marketing strategy. If we aren’t getting any lookers for studios, then we’ll do a campaign that highlights the incredible attributes of the best studio.

The open houses we’ve had so far show a pretty equal distribution of interest across unit types. We expected to see comparatively more interest in studios and two bedrooms. Studios tend to go fast in brownstone Brooklyn and are affordable to the broadest spectrum of buyers. People looking for two bedrooms include those who need a two bedroom and those who could live happily in a one bedroom. Or at least that was our experience before Third + Bond.

What’s their reaction to the project?
This data is collected by the brokers anecdotally. We don’t have a comments section on the sign-in sheet. It’s an open house, not a blog. Many of our buyers have remarked on the fabulous rear yard designed and installed by The Organic Gardener. While only seven units get private rear yards, we think this yard speaks loads for the project—sustainable, good design, and comfortable. So in a future ad campaign we might highlight it. Buyers often ask what can be built across the street. That’s sensible—if you are calculating a view of the KenTile sign into your offer, you want to know that you’ll be able to see it. So we made sure we could explain the zoning and expectations for our neighbors across Third. We have a prospective buyer who looked at a certain two bedroom and thought the living area seemed challenging to furnish with the kitchen island, which wasn’t installed yet but was on the floor plan. Easy enough, we decided to store the island for now. If that buyer goes away and another one comes who wants the island, we can still put it in.

Overall, we get a lot of compliments on the design, the look and feel of the apartments. The garden duplexes always generate comments about the size of the living rooms and the amount of light provided by the extra large windows. And everyone loves the bathrooms (which is nice since we spent tons of time on them in those endless pre-development meetings). Young adults come with their parents to look at the studios—the kid’s first home away from home. The kids love the studios. The parents remind them that the first house they bought cost half that.
The response we got last fall when we held the Pratt opening and several open houses was critical in our decision to shut down any and all marketing efforts until this spring. Almost everyone who came through said the building felt unfinished and they worried about signing a contract for an unfinished building given the economic climate. Without that feedback we could have been spinning our wheels and spending our dough when the market wasn’t ready. Now with 30-50+ people coming every Sunday, we think we made the right choice.

So if you really want to toy with us, come to the open house , mark down Internet Other and pretend to be from Staten Island. The data might be unbelievable but we’ll start advertising on Staten Island websites…

Inside Third & Bond: Weeks 1-128 [Brownstoner]

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