We just had a 2 hour ‘Town Hall’ Zoom meeting (that was broadcast live on Facebook via Club Pineapple), to inform the agents, buyers, sellers and public that Julia B. Fee Sotheby’s has been working diligently on behalf of our clients – both sellers and buyers to find alternative methods in which to best serve everyone.
Firstly, and Paul Breunich ( CEO & President), stressed that everything we do MUST be under the guidelines and mandate of the governor for safety and health reasons. We market our listings with professional responsibility, and stand by our core values on behalf of our clients.
New listings are down by 76% in Westchester. However, we are down just 69% which depicts the strength of our company. William Pitt – Julia B. Fee Sotheby’s while ranked Number 2 in Westchester, is only down by 3% at this time in new listings behind the Number 1 ranked company, and it should be noted that we have 5 offices in Westchester compared to the 19 offices of the other competitor. Prior to COVID-19, our company had been up 29% over last year, and we were all looking forward to a banner year in real estate.
As of March 24th, per Zillow, on-line Home Shopping was down by 32%. The industry in our area seemingly shut down. As of April 15th, online home shopping was just down by 2%. This informs us that the buyers were starting to view properties again. Nationally, active property page views were up by 18%. This was and is a good sign. This informs us that the buyers are restarting their home searches in some capacity.
We, as a company, have always been innovative, and Paul Breunich is part of a national think tank on how we can collectively work better on behalf of our clients in this new real estate market.
We have a virtual agent playbook, and we will be introducing the blueprint for virtual listings, from soup to nuts with videos for our clients to make it that much easier. We can ‘Zoom” a listing presentation now and offer virtual open houses, virtual appointments, and our website is now featuring those ‘virtual appointments’. Videos have always had a prominent display on our web site, but also now the Matterport 3D tour app will also be front and center. We have so many programs to better promote our properties – one being Lumentus which now enables us to not only market a listing, but to also offer a link for the virtual showings which is lead generated. Vin Socci, our Chief Operating Officer, mentioned that we had a trial run with just one listing yesterday for a property in Harrison, and we had 40 leads within a day. Questions were asked of the visitors such as were they ‘just browsing, looking to purchase in 3 months, 6 months, a year, etc.’ and most were looking between 1-3 months . This particular ad ran in Manhattan and Brooklyn but it informs us that people are seeking to leave the city, and it also informs us how we can better market our properties at this time. Buyers want more options also.
We will be bringing out digital flip page brochures – in short everything to best serve our clients in this ever changing world, and we will continue to adapt regarding the state updates regarding real estate. The virtual blueprint is not eman to replace in person content, but it is a blueprint for providing the seller with as many options as possible.
Ina virtual world, all eyes are on social marketing. Facebook reaches 60.6^ of internet users, Instagram reaches 1 Billion every day.
Our company has wonderful social advertising access, the company is the epitome of branding and elegance.
As an aside, our company hosted 2137 Zoom meetings in the past 5 weeks totalling 575,000 minutes.
( (we) am here for you, and I look forward to keeping you informed .
Westchester is GREAT!
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