Just Get Out There! How To Create Your Own Luck

““Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity!” ”

— Seneca-Roman Philosopher

A recent blog post inspired this article, when the writer mentioned luck brought a buyer comes his way through what seemed to be unlikely circumstances. The common notion is that luck is an accidental unplanned event brought by chance rather that through one’s actions.   We are in Seneca’s camp, when we define luck and have realized that luck is a constant in our world.

When we were in commercial real estate, we knew that the more time we were out of the office, the more business we would attract.  Out of the office meant canvassing, introducing ourselves to new property owners, business owners and developers and noting new for sale/for lease signs. 

We discovered was that even if there was no immediate evidence of gaining new business from this extroverted exercise, new business would still come our way upon returning to the office.  We jokingly referred to this exercise as “dowsing” for business.  Another phenomena we noticed is that we were inspired to pursue new ways to develop new business.

In marketing luxury real estate this would mean networking by introducing yourself to homeowners with a defined “door knocking” strategy in mind. The majority of our clients spend the bulk of their time out of the office meeting new people. 

One of our clients is an avid sportsman.  He is a triathlete, golfer, practices yoga, flies small planes, and loves to ride his bike on long treks.  This is how he prospects for sellers and buyers.  His client pool comes from his sporting activities.  He considers himself one of the luckiest real estate brokers. 

How do you create your own luck?  Create more opportunities for serendipity by spending more time out of your office.   Delegate everything you can when it comes to transaction processing. Just get out there!

Written by Ron & Alexandra Seigel-

ABOUT:  Napa Consultants, International is the leader in brand strategy for the luxury real estate industry.  They work exclusively with professionals who are passionate about gaining or sustaining market leadership. With an expertise in personal branding, company branding, luxury real estate website design and social media marketing they help their clients become the breakaway brand in their marketplace.

Do You Have An Eagle's Eye For The Right Listings?

Focus is the name of the game when it comes to listing luxury real estate properties for sale.  That is, if you want to build a business that consistently generates predictable cash flow. 

Most luxury real estate marketing professionals fall into the trap of taking whatever listings come their way. As a result they live “hand-to-mouth”, from one commission check to the next, whenever the next one happens to come along. They do not have a focused game plan that builds a referral-worthy reputation.

You need to have laser sharp focus, an eagle's eye, to identify and take on only those listing that fall within your chosen niche.  Eagles know their prey and they exclude all else when they hunt. 

This is how you gain a reputation as the niche expert and create a momentum of referral business that is sustainable over time. Without this level of focus you reduce your chances of leveraging word-of-mouth adverting by a significant magnitude.

To live hand-to-mouth or by word-of-mouth, that is the question.  It all comes down to eagle’s eye sharp focus.

Written by Ron & Alexandra Seigel-

ABOUT:  Napa Consultants, International is the leader in brand strategy for the luxury real estate industry.  They work exclusively with professionals who are passionate about gaining or sustaining market leadership. With an expertise in personal branding, company branding, luxury real estate website design and social media marketing they help their clients become the breakaway brand in their marketplace.

Stand Out With Your Brand By Making The Implicit Explicit! Part2

As a luxury real estate marketing professional your brand must stand out in a crowded marketplace. In other words, you need to find a way to make what it implicit about YOU, explicit. 

In our previous post, we wrote about the crowded wine industry.  Here is another crowded industry that is growing at a rapid rate. The Health and Wellness category includes fresh juices. This strong trend was worth 23 billion dollars in 2013. The juicer appliances market is a 277 billion dollar industry for those who prefer to make their own fresh juices.

We spotted this bus (pictured above) on our way to the Santa Barbara Farmers market this Saturday.  We loved the graphics evoking times gone by of a simpler enjoyable existence.  As we walked around the bus, we noticed that they had listed their core values.  That list made the implicit explicit.

By reading this list, you know exactly what Juice Ranch stands for!  This is another example of good branding!

How can you make the implicit aspects of your brand explicit?

Written by Ron & Alexandra Seigel-

ABOUT:  Napa Consultants, International is the leader in brand strategy for the luxury real estate industry.  They work exclusively with professionals who are passionate about gaining or sustaining market leadership. With an expertise in personal branding, company branding, luxury real estate website design and social media marketing they help their clients become the breakaway brand in their marketplace.

Are You Marketing With Heart and Passion?

 A well-designed marketing strategy makes selling irrelevant.--Peter Drucker

Knowing and understanding your target market is of paramount importance.  Most luxury real estate marketing professionals use an ineffective buckshot marketing strategy that lacks focus. They have not clearly identified an under-served audience to whom they could market with heart and passion, which is the surest route to success in this business. 

There are many women who suffer from low self-esteem, because they have bought into aesthetic cultural biases.  This represents an under-served market niche for the cosmetic industry. Here is an example of how M A C Cosmetics strategizes to tap into this under-served market niche in the cosmetic industry.

Yesterday, we noticed this M A C Cosmetics display (pictured above).  These women are not models. They are contest winners. M A C has an annual contest asking its customers to upload photos and a 100-word description expressing what makes them awesome. 

Contestants were required to share this on MAC’s social media pages.  Six lucky winners won an all-expense paid trip to NYC, where they were given a complete makeover.  A photo shoot followed and they became the next face of the “M A C nificent Me” Collection.

To experience what it feels like to reach your target with heartfelt precision and passion watch this brief video.

Are Your Marketing With Heart and Passion?

Written by Ron & Alexandra Seigel-

ABOUT:  Napa Consultants, International is the leader in brand strategy for the luxury real estate industry.  They work exclusively with professionals who are passionate about gaining or sustaining market leadership. With an expertise in personal branding, company branding, luxury real estate website design and social media marketing they help their clients become the breakaway brand in their marketplace.

Are You A Genuine Expert Or Just Glib?

Many luxury real estate companies and agents claim that they are experts in their marketplace, the leading local authority.  However, when you review the scope of their territory (including the number of homes in their ‘farm”) it becomes clear that they are just glib. In actuality they possess superficial market knowledge at best.  They want to give the impression that they know everything, even if the market place is enormous.  

In our commercial real estate practice, we specialized in a particular target area with specific client profiles.  On occasion the same developers or owners had properties in what is known as the “Valley” just north of Los Angeles.   They would ask us to handle their Valley listings as well.  We turned those additional opportunities down because we did not have the depth of market knowledge to properly market those properties based on our high standards of service.   We were happy to bring potential tenants or buyers to their properties, but not handle the listing.

In one instance a friend of ours who owned several restaurants wanted to open another restaurant.  He insisted that we work with him, even though we just knew the basics about this real estate niche.  But, he offered to teach us.

When we found a space that he liked, we spent a lot of time with his restaurant architects learning the specifics. We gained an extensive knowledge base of restaurant building costs and the massive amount of regulations imposed on restaurant owners by the city, state, and fire department.  This expertise became a niche, and that niche became one of our profit centers.

You can get away with glibness only so long before a sophisticated buyer or seller sees right through you.  Being glib may initially result in a smattering of listings and sales in some marketplaces. But, if your goal is to achieve longevity in this business you need to be a genuine expert.

Written by Ron & Alexandra Seigel-

ABOUT:  Napa Consultants, International is the leader in brand strategy for the luxury real estate industry.  They work exclusively with professionals who are passionate about gaining or sustaining market leadership. With an expertise in personal branding, company branding, luxury real estate website design and social media marketing they help their clients become the breakaway brand in their marketplace.

Stand Out By Making The Implicit Explicit

As a luxury real estate marketing professional your brand must stand out in a crowded marketplace. In other words, you need to find a way to make what it implicit about YOU, explicit.

In the crowded wine industry we recently noticed that one of the wineries bottled their un-oaked Chardonnay in a gray ceramic bottle. Mer Soleil Silver decided to bottle their un-oaked Chardonnay this way to pay homage to the cement tanks/ instead of the oak barrels in which the classic Chardonnay ferments.  

This is a relatively new fermentation method that we had not previously heard of; the bottle, or shall we say their “packaging” definitely caught our attention. By making the implicit (to them) explicit for us, we became aware of an entirely new category of winemaking.

We were not compelled to buy it, even after learning about the new method.  But, the brand SILVER is “tattooed” in our brain.  That is good branding!

How can you make the implicit aspects of your brand explicit?

Written by Ron & Alexandra Seigel-

ABOUT:  Napa Consultants, International is the leader in brand strategy for the luxury real estate industry.  They work exclusively with professionals who are passionate about gaining or sustaining market leadership. With an expertise in personal branding, company branding, luxury real estate website design and social media marketing they help their clients become the breakaway brand in their marketplace.

How to Avoid 2 Major “Client Traps” and Stop Teaching Pigs to Sing!

If your self-esteem is consistently high, as a luxury real estate marketing professional, and you are diligent about accepting only those clients who are a match to you in self-esteem, you will thrive.  To help you keep your self-esteem intact, here is a warning about two major “client traps” to avoid at all costs. 

Client Trap #1:

There are some clients for whom it is more important that you fail in trying to help them, than it is to receive the tremendous benefit of the service that you offer with the best of intentions. They give you ample clues from the outset that they are going to be a pain to deal with like ragging on previous agents or brokers who failed them in the past.  But, you ignore the clues and think you will be the exception, the one who will be able to out-smart their attempts to ensnare you.  

Even after equitably extricating yourself from this type of toxic client relationship you may find that they insist on nattering about you as well. To avoid falling into this trap again you must immediately replenish your self-esteem. By doing so you will no longer be susceptible to such insidious ploys, and you will no longer attract this type of client in the first place.

Client Trap #2: 

A second client trap is working with clients who think they know better than you, while you keep trying to convince them otherwise.  This is the FISBO seller who thinks he or she does not need an agent’s help, or the seller who insists on an unrealistic listing price, or the seller who does not believe that staging the home will make it easier to sell.  This is the buyer who insists on making low ball offers against your warnings that such actions will be futile.

We follow Robert Heinlien’s advice to avoid falling into these client traps: “Never try to teach a pig to sing. It is a waste of your time and it annoys the pig”. 

Maintaining your self-esteem not only feels better than the alternative, but your life depends on it.  Pay attention to the clues.  Stay clear of these types of clients. 

Written by Ron & Alexandra Seigel-

ABOUT:  Napa Consultants, International is the leader in brand strategy for the luxury real estate industry.  They work exclusively with professionals who are passionate about gaining or sustaining market leadership. With an expertise in personal branding, company branding, luxury real estate website design and social media marketing they help their clients become the breakaway brand in their marketplace.

Sushi Out: Bookstore In!

Some independent real estate companies have become virtual companies. We saw this happening when luxury real estate companies leased executive suites rather than a permanent brick and mortar store.  These executive suites have prestigious addresses in Class A high-rise buildings. The service includes conference rooms on as needed basis, and a receptionist to answer and route calls.

A recent report from a London based luxury online retailer of antique luxury watches found its digital business increased remarkably, when they opened a boutique in the Victoria Quarter in Leeds.  In surveying their customers, they found that the physical store increased their credibility factor as well as their bottom line.  As the founder and brand director, Lloyd Armsdon, of Watchfinder said, “It fits the brand, it differentiates me from every body else out there –the eBays and the like.”

Today, the Seattle Times headline stated; Amazon, Bookstore Slayer, Meet Amazon, Bookstore Owner.  Yes, Amazon is opening a bookstore today in Seattle at the former location of Blue C Sushi in the University District.  Amazon’s VP of Amazon books, Jennifer Cast told the paper, “Its data with heart.”  The store will display ratings on all the books stocked in its inventory. 

How important is your luxury real estate brick and mortar location?

Written by Ron & Alexandra Seigel-

ABOUT:  Napa Consultants, International is the leader in brand strategy for the luxury real estate industry.  They work exclusively with professionals who are passionate about gaining or sustaining market leadership. With an expertise in personal branding, company branding, luxury real estate website design and social media marketing they help their clients become the breakaway brand in their marketplace.

Feeling Puny? Self-Esteem is the Immune System of Your Soul

In marketing luxury real estate, you do not have to be as wealthy as your clients to be very successful.  You just need to be equal to them in self-esteem and not feel puny. Self-esteem a measure of your intrinsic value and it is the immune system of your soul.

Most high net worth consumers are very sure of themselves especially if they are “self-made”.  They are a pleasure to be around when you feel self-assured. But, if you feel insecure and transmit that uncertainty you might just loose the client.

There are those high net worth consumers who are insecure and sometimes try to treat you as inferior. If your self-esteem is high you will be immune to this. When you do not react to them they will usually cease this behavior at least with when they are around you.

When you are fixed in your point of view this is a clue that your self-esteem is low. If you feel like it is more important to be right you are more inclined to tune out other people’s perspective rather than allowing them their right to their difference in opinion.  This does not bode well for you if your goal is to build a healthy luxury real estate practice.  You certainly can kiss goodbye to potential referrals!

When you have high self-esteem you do not have to prove anything, nor do you need to be pretentious.  Other people’s opinions do not diminish your own.  You might say self-esteem helps you to be immune to a disease we lovingly call “the punies”, or feeling small.

Self-esteem is not something you attain and then it is yours forever more.  It is something you need to build and maintain your whole life, like your health.  But, having it sure makes it easier to deal with tough situations. Self-esteem is the immune system of your soul.  It is also like an insurance policy for a successful career as a luxury real estate marketing professional.

Written by Ron & Alexandra Seigel-

ABOUT:  Napa Consultants, International is the leader in brand strategy for the luxury real estate industry.  They work exclusively with professionals who are passionate about gaining or sustaining market leadership. With an expertise in personal branding, company branding, luxury real estate website design and social media marketing they help their clients become the breakaway brand in their marketplace.

Is Humor Part of Your Brand Marketing Strategy?

In order to stand out and be top of mind in your marketplace as a luxury real estate marketing professional, one of the avenues to be memorable is to use humor as part of your brand strategy.  Humor is humanizing, because it is a universal language.

Humor in marketing if done right can catch attention and become unforgettable. When we lived in Los Angeles, we banked at the family owned Santa Monica Bank.  The service was superb, and they occupied the ground floor of the building where we had our offices.

They launched a humorous campaign on 167 buses in a 50 square mile radius in their target market. The one- liners caught everyone’s attention which included the media: The name is “Bond. Savings Bond”,  “Make Money The Old Fashioned Way, Borrow It!” “Girls just want to have Funds!” 240 months later, the bank was sold, and the last message was, “After 20 years on the bus, we reached our stop”. 

Some of the wineries are also using humor to distinguish themselves from the traditional wine labels with quirky names and eye catching bright graphics.  Michael David is a wonderful example of this.  They still retain the traditional label of Michael David as part of their offerings.  They have added new labels such as Freak Show, Cabernet Sauvignon (90 rating), 7 Deadly Zins (Zinfandels), and Inkblot, Cabernet Franc.

Is Humor Part of Your Brand Marketing Strategy?

Written by Ron & Alexandra Seigel-

ABOUT:  Napa Consultants, International is the leader in brand strategy for the luxury real estate industry.  They work exclusively with professionals who are passionate about gaining or sustaining market leadership. With an expertise in personal branding, company branding, luxury real estate website design and social media marketing they help their clients become the breakaway brand in their marketplace.

Luxury Is In The Details: Are You Paying Attention To Details?

As a luxury real estate marketing professional, one of your mantras to repeat is “luxury is in the details.”  Details are the quality cues that make the difference in how people perceive you.  It is what makes you unforgettable, and easy to refer.  Here is an example:

When Kanaloa, our fishmonger, decided to move to downtown Santa Barbara, they planned to also open a café within the store with an outdoor seating area.  This was a natural for them, as one of their employees is a chef. 

Yesterday, we had lunch there.  We both ordered an assortment of fish tacos (the tortillas are hand made on site).  After the first bite we were both delighted by the freshness, spicing, delicate crispiness and taste of these tacos.

As we enjoyed our tacos, we noticed so many details that made the meal even more enjoyable.  Our tacos came on a biodegradable cardboard rack/holder (pictured above).

When we asked our hostess as to where they bought the taco racks, she told us, they had them made.  This makes eating tacos easier.  It does not fall apart and make a mess on your plate.  We have seen the plastic and metal versions.  However, in keeping with their sustainable and eco friendly mindset, these cardboard racks are recyclable.

This attention to detail is what keeps us coming back, and telling everyone about them.  As we were waiting for our yoga class to start yesterday afternoon, we told everyone gathered about our experience at Kanaloa. 

Are You Paying Attention to Details?

Written by Ron & Alexandra Seigel-

ABOUT:  Napa Consultants, International is the leader in brand strategy for the luxury real estate industry.  They work exclusively with professionals who are passionate about gaining or sustaining market leadership. With an expertise in personal branding, company branding, luxury real estate website design and social media marketing they help their clients become the breakaway brand in their marketplace.

Self Expression in Branding-–Or, You Too Can Have A James Bond Moment!

When marketing luxury real estate keep in mind your brand’s power of self-expression that can convince potential clients to hire you.  Consumers look for brands whose cultural meanings match who they are or want to become.  These brands sustain and communicate their social self and identity.

For example, when it comes to selling luxury real estate, many feel that hiring a Christie’s affiliate or a Sotheby’s agent enables them to feel that they are part of a prestigious European auction house. This powerful attraction for self-expression is so strong that it can at times override the decision of hiring the most competent agent for the job. 

In order to fully understand the power of self-expression in branding, consider the merchandising power of the James Bond franchise.  The newest film, Spectre, has an array of product placements to trigger purchases that can give fans their “Bond moment”. Months before its scheduled release the N. Peale cashmere sweater, worn by James Bond (Daniel Craig), sold out. 

Aston Martin has created a unique car for the film, called the DB10, and they are selling a limited edition of 150. Jaguar’s C-X75 also has a starring role as does the Range Rover. Spirit brands like Bollinger, Belvedere and Heineken are also among the many brands represented.  All of these brands are betting that fans will identify their products with Bond’s suave and debonair persona and find self-expression by purchasing them.

Does your personal or company brand provide an opportunity for self- expression?

Written by Ron & Alexandra Seigel-

ABOUT:  Napa Consultants, International is the leader in brand strategy for the luxury real estate industry.  They work exclusively with professionals who are passionate about gaining or sustaining market leadership. With an expertise in personal branding, company branding, luxury real estate website design and social media marketing they help their clients become the breakaway brand in their marketplace.

Having The Last Word

From your first introduction to your parting words, "ENJOY", after the sale of your luxury home listing your primary intention is to uplift the spirits of your clients.  All luxury real estate agents, who are worth their salt claim to provide excellent service.  However, if you consistently reassure your clients every step of the way and provide them peace of mind you  are more likely to get their repeat business.  

Transactions can often be stressful.  Your job is to minimize stress and maximize the joy of buying or selling the home. The end of the transaction should be like the dessert course of a fine meal.  Your wish for the buyer is to enjoy their new home.  Your wish for the seller is to enjoy the next chapter in their life.

Written by Ron & Alexandra Seigel-

ABOUT:  Napa Consultants, International is the leader in brand strategy for the luxury real estate industry.  They work exclusively with professionals who are passionate about gaining or sustaining market leadership. With an expertise in personal branding, company branding, luxury real estate website design and social media marketing they help their clients become the breakaway brand in their marketplace.

Are You Lost On the Sea of Sameness?

As a luxury real estate marketing professional, are you perceived as the market leader or a serious contender? Or, are you lost in the sea of sameness, blending into the crowd?

Your market share is the percentage of the total sales in your marketplace or within your niche that is earned by you over a specified time period. It is that portion of the market that YOU control.  If you are “in it to win it” (the lion’s share that is) you must seize control of how you are perceived.

By controlling how you are perceived, we are not implying that you need to be a “control freak”.  We mean that you need to be DELIBERATE in projecting your brand message, both verbally and through your graphics, so that your target market perceives you, on your terms, as distinct from your closest competitors. 

There are dozens of restaurants in Santa Barbara.  Yet, when asked which ones we would recommend to visitors looking for a great dinner, only a select few come readily to mind. 

Opal on State Street is on our short list.  The comfortable décor and the menu are reminiscent of the wonderful bistros in Paris and Lyon.  The prices are reasonable which makes us want to keep coming back to try new items. The Bouillabaisse is better than what we have sampled in Marseille.  And, they bake fresh artisan bread daily. 

Although we would not hesitate to dine at Opal for a special occasion, in our minds this is a “neighborhood place” to frequent regularly. Apparently, others feel the same, as there was a line out the door the last time we were there.  When we spoke to the manager about how we perceived the restaurant in this manner, he smiled from ear to ear because that was exactly the brand message that Opal deliberately projects.

Are you lost on the sea of sameness or are you in control of how you want to be perceived by your target market? Seize control and watch your market share increase.

Written by Ron & Alexandra Seigel-

ABOUT:  Napa Consultants, International is the leader in brand strategy for the luxury real estate industry.  They work exclusively with professionals who are passionate about gaining or sustaining market leadership. With an expertise in personal branding, company branding, luxury real estate website design and social media marketing they help their clients become the breakaway brand in their marketplace.

Are You Letting Ants Get In The Way of The Elephant?

Do not let the ants get in the way of the elephant. This means keep your eyes on the big goal (elephants-new listings and sold properties).  Don’t let minor distractions (ants) become impediments to your big goals.  Distractions come in many forms. Often agents focus on what is going wrong rather than holding the vision.  

Here are some common examples of distractions that take your eyes off target.

Ranting and raving

Incompetent agents

Hard to please clients

Lenders and inspectors

These are just the ants getting in the way of the elephant. Focusing your energy on these moments is a waste of your precious time. 

Another time waster is writing blog posts about these ants and having your readers sympathize with you.  It hooks them in and gets them distracted too. Recounting their ant stories adds fuel to the fire and fortifies your position of suffering as the victim of the ants.  The trouble with continuously focusing on these minutiae is that you wind up attracting ants deal after deal.  It becomes the norm in your transactions.

By the way, given that our constant change in weather has created ant invasions all over Santa Barbara, we recommend that you have a supply of Terro Ant Baits.  It really works!  It keeps them out of the way of our elephants! This is not recommended for “human” ants, however.

Are You Letting Ants Get In The Way of Your Elephant?

Written by Ron & Alexandra Seigel-

ABOUT:  Napa Consultants, International is the leader in brand strategy for the luxury real estate industry.  They work exclusively with professionals who are passionate about gaining or sustaining market leadership. With an expertise in personal branding, company branding, luxury real estate website design and social media marketing they help their clients become the breakaway brand in their marketplace.

Does Your Eye Candy Leads to More Sales?

The business of marketing luxury real estate on the Internet and in print is all about capturing and holding the attention of your target market. Stunning photography of your luxury listings is like eye candy. It leads to more sales and can also help you gain more market share because it demonstrates your marketing savvy.

Selecting an attention-getting lead image for your blog posts can also help you develop more readership because it compels them to follow you.  A recent study by Shift, a marketing firm, confirmed that adding a picture to a tweet increases the likelihood that readers will click on an embedded link, by five times.

New technology is surfacing that analyzes which images grab the most attention.  This will be a boon to advertisers who seek a bigger piece of the $1.6 Trillion e-commerce market.

If you want to be a leader in your luxury real estate market, you may not need this technology.  You just need to find a photographer who can work at the level of Architectural Digest. Think of your primary listing photo being good enough to make it on this magazine cover. Eye candy attracts more attention and leads to more sales.

Does Your Eye Candy Leads to More Sales?

Written by Ron & Alexandra Seigel-

ABOUT:  Napa Consultants, International is the leader in brand strategy for the luxury real estate industry.  They work exclusively with professionals who are passionate about gaining or sustaining market leadership. With an expertise in personal branding, company branding, luxury real estate website design and social media marketing they help their clients become the breakaway brand in their marketplace.

Is Your Blog Grammatically Attractive to Your Target Market?

Luxury real estate marketing is like matchmaking. If you are going to write a blog as part of your strategy to attract clients, make sure that your posts are grammatically correct. Studies have shown that grammar is very important if you want to have a large following.

A recent lifestyle article in the Wall Street Journal titled, “What’s Really Hot on Dating Sites? Proper Grammar”, inspired this post. It cited an example of a gentleman leery of meeting his date for drinks, because her reply read”  “I will see you their” instead of “there.”  He was right: the date did not go well. 

Match.com surveyed over 5000 of their members asking for the most important criteria for assessing a potential mate.  The results revealed that 88% of women, and 75% of men judged a date based on the person’s grammar.  One the respondents commented, “When you get a message that is grammatically correct, it is very attractive”.

If grammar is your weakness, there is an app for you called The Grade that rates messages for typos and grammar errors.  And, it assigns the message a letter grade from A+ to F.  There is also a site called Grammarly that claims to “find and correct up to 10 times more mistakes than your word processor”.

A well-written post reflects the amount of care and effort extended in your writing.  It may well be the deciding point when it comes to hiring you to list a luxury home, or represent a luxury buyer.

Written by Ron & Alexandra Seigel-

ABOUT:  Napa Consultants, International is the leader in brand strategy for the luxury real estate industry.  They work exclusively with professionals who are passionate about gaining or sustaining market leadership. With an expertise in personal branding, company branding, luxury real estate website design and social media marketing they help their clients become the breakaway brand in their marketplace.

Take The Test: Are Your Clients Uplifting or Toxic?

Winning listings and closing transactions are definitely the sweet spots in luxury real estate marketing. However, working with extraordinary people who uplift your spirits keeps you coming back for more.

Working with “toxic” clients is a sure way to get depressed about the luxury real estate game.  Here is a good test to determine if you are working with uplifting or toxic clients.  It is a quote from a very wise man, a philosopher and former San Francisco longshoreman.

“A valid index by which to evaluate the influence other people have on us is by how much they increase or diminish our benevolence toward our fellow men.”

— Eric Hoffer

Benevolence is kindness, compassion, generosity, good will and magnanimity.  Do your clients inspire these feeling in you?

Written by Ron & Alexandra Seigel-

ABOUT:  Napa Consultants, International is the leader in brand strategy for the luxury real estate industry.  They work exclusively with professionals who are passionate about gaining or sustaining market leadership. With an expertise in personal branding, company branding, luxury real estate website design and social media marketing they help their clients become the breakaway brand in their marketplace.

High Touch Equals High Trust

We have always been proponents of high touch.  High touch equals high trust.

Early in our commercial real estate career in Beverly Hills, California we developed a high touch system with our listing clients and our buyer clients. We were one of the first real estate firms to use computers throughout our entire organization. We bought ACT (considered the best at the time) as our customer relationship management software to help us manage our time and stay consistently in touch with our clients.  

ACT replaced our tickler file system. But, we knew it could not replace us.  We knew we still had to have face time and phone time with our clients.  When we took on a new listing, whether it was a sales listing or a leasing assignment in an office building or retail project, we sat down with our clients and discussed their preferred way to communicate, the best time to reach them, etc. 

We also produced a report each week for each listing.  We kept track of all the showings, the cooperating agents, and their client’s names.  We also discussed our follow up and the likelihood of getting a purchase offer or signing up prospective tenants. This included our suggestions for improvements in our weekly face-to-face meetings with our exclusive listing clients.

On the sales listings of commercial building, many of our sellers wanted to hear what happened at each showing, and we would call them after each showing. When an offer came, we moved at lightning speed to present and write the counter. We kept everyone in the loop, agents, attorneys, title, escrow, etc.  Everyone stayed informed throughout the whole process.

Today, as brand strategists for the luxury real estate industry, our clients are luxury real estate firms and agents.  We maintain the same high touch mindset. We always travel to our client’s marketplace, anywhere in the world, and spend at least a day with them.

In developing a brand strategy we produce a logo, a brand position statement, a brand identity statement, a marketing strategy, and a website. We use the online collaborative workspace of BASECAMP to coordinate the project. Everyone is actively involved with us on each project: our web developer, our SEO expert, our graphic designer, and our clients.

We talk to everyone at least once a week, and more often as we decide on the final version of various items.  High touch equals high trust.

Written by Ron & Alexandra Seigel-

ABOUT:  Napa Consultants, International is the leader in brand strategy for the luxury real estate industry.  They work exclusively with professionals who are passionate about gaining or sustaining market leadership. With an expertise in personal branding, company branding, luxury real estate website design and social media marketing they help their clients become the breakaway brand in their marketplace.

Are You Staying True To Your Brand?

The ancient Greek aphorism, “Know Thyself” could be restated, “Know thine own brand”.  Your brand is your DNA, the unique code or soul of your business. You cannot remind yourself enough of this sound advice.

In Hamlet, Shakespeare’s character Polonius advised his son, "To thine own self be true".  Our advice is this: “To thine own brand be true”. Stay true to your unique code, your distinct brand DNA.

Are You Staying True To Your Brand?

Written by Ron & Alexandra Seigel-

ABOUT:  Napa Consultants, International is the leader in brand strategy for the luxury real estate industry.  They work exclusively with professionals who are passionate about gaining or sustaining market leadership. With an expertise in personal branding, company branding, luxury real estate website design and social media marketing they help their clients become the breakaway brand in their marketplace.