As you look to expand and grow your business, plenty of options are available to you. From becoming a property manager to a commercial real estate agent to even a luxury real estate agent, your opportunities are limited only by what you want to achieve and how willing you are to work for it.
Becoming a luxury real estate agent requires you to adopt a whole makeover in presenting yourself to clients, a technical understanding of the global luxury market, and how to procure buyers for your client's listing.
Moreover, becoming a luxury agent requires highly specialized training and knowledge above what the typical agent has learned.
Once you’ve decided to become an agent that caters to the wealthy and elite, learning how to win a luxury listing doesn’t have to be complicated.
In a similar fashion to winning other types of real estate listings, you need to be strategic. Create a specific market plan that includes creative ways to showcase the luxury listing, such as elegant marketing materials, top of the results for search engines, and that you have a global reach for potential buyers (more on that later).
To win a luxury listing is more about what you do ahead of pitching than anything you can do on the day of the listing appointment. In the luxury marketplace, reputation travels fast and hard, creating a perception of whether a client wants to work with you or not.
To guarantee you win that luxury real estate listing, you need to understand the global luxury market, have a potential buyer’s pool, and have a way to showcase the luxury property that stands out above all the other luxury listings.
What Is A Luxury Real Estate Agent
A luxury real estate agent is someone who focuses on a niche of the industry with properties valued at $2 million or higher. Luxury homes are built with premium materials and finishes, and the luxury agent brands themselves as providing unique, catered service.
Agents who choose to deal exclusively with UHNWI or ultra-high-net-worth individuals (people with assets of $30 million or more) will be knowledgeable on homes that specialize in premium quality, upscale amenities, location, and immaculate architecture.
Brand Yourself As A Luxury Agent
The luxury market is hyper-competitive and requires patience, diligence, and excellent networking skills to succeed. To be seen as the agent high-income earners want to work with, you need to brand yourself as someone who understands luxury's finer aspects.
In the luxury market, people expect top-notch, on-demand service. There’s an expectation of only the best; best service, best upgrades and finishes, best appliances, and best negotiation ability.
When you set out to become branded as a luxury agent, remember that YOU are the product you’re selling to potential clients.
Appearances matter, so how you dress and your overall appearance is an investment for you.
Adopt A Luxury Lifestyle
Being seen as a person of luxury means adopting a lifestyle of luxury. For example, joining elite country clubs, gyms, or areas where you can network with potential buyers and sellers creates the impression that you understand their needs and potential problems.
Don’t sell the farm to put on airs, but you want to be elbow to elbow with high-income earners and influencers as a way to expand your brand recognition and reputation.
Adopting a luxury lifestyle is essential to your brand as a luxury agent. So, in addition to joining elite clubs, the type of things you post on social media should highlight a high-end lifestyle.
Posts focusing on 5-star dining, gallery showings, prestigious charity events, and golf tournaments are good ways to showcase yourself as appreciative and knowledgeable about the elite lifestyle.
Join An Experienced Luxury Brokerage
Moving from being a real estate agent to becoming a luxury agent involves a steep learning curve. The best way to accelerate your learning and begin establishing your reputation is to pair with an agent and brokerage with the experience and track record of working in luxury real estate.
By joining a brokerage specializing in luxury real estate, you’re already positioning yourself as a part of a team that will only benefit your client.
When you become a luxury agent, one of the most important first steps is to study what other successful agents have done. Pay attention to how they brand their services, the types of organizations, charities, and events they participate in, and hone their networking and marketing strategies.
Be as open-minded and receptive as possible; remember, it’s about positioning your business and brand for long-term success, and you may need to sit back and learn about the differences between the real estate and luxury markets.
Create The Perception As The Luxury Expert in Your Area
Once you’ve joined a luxury brokerage and have saddled up with an experienced agent, you need to strategize ways to stand out and above the competition. You need to create a perception and establish a reputation as the go-to luxury expert in your area.
Consider creative ways to boost your brand identity and recognition by becoming interviewed in major publications, addressing common problems that high-end earners experience and how you have solutions for them, and becoming the most knowledgeable resource.
Teach A Course Or Write A Book On The Luxury Market
One of the most significant ways to be perceived as a luxury real estate agent is to be showcased as a luxury agent. To enhance your profile and reputation, consider teaching a video course that addresses a specific pain point regarding the luxury market and presents solutions to those problems.
Another area is to write a book on ways to sell in a competitive luxury market. Again, you can outsource the writing. Just be clear on content and direction.
Once you’ve created the videos and book, start publicizing your efforts anywhere and everywhere.
The goal is to get as much free exposure and publicity as possible. One thing to consider is signing up with HARO, which stands for help a reporter out, a service that connects experts with reporters looking for information and quotes for various industries and fields.
The best part is to have a small blurb or quote in a major newspaper or magazine and then utilize that in your promotional materials.
For example, you reach out on HARO to a reporter writing an article about how inflation is causing a slowdown in the luxury market.
You contact them and answer briefly, helping them with their article. In return, your name is now included in the article, and you can spin that in various marketing materials like “…as seen in the New York Times.”
The goal here is to enhance the perception that you are a luxury real estate agent expert.
Identify Their Needs And Problems
As you’re branding yourself as a luxury real estate agent, keep in mind that means you understand the importance of the little things.
Showcase that you have a broader, more profound understanding of the concerns of ultra-high-net-worth individuals and build the perception that you have a piece of profound knowledge and more comprehensive expertise than a simple real estate agent.
To do so, you need to find their needs and problems and create solutions to help remedy those issues.
High net worth people have interests different from those of the main street and blue-collar workers. So spend some time and dive into these potential clients' common interests and concerns as they align with how you wish to brand your luxury services.
Interests include:
- Real estate investing
- Legal tax avoidance, shelters, and implications
- Asset appraisal and privacy protection
- Insurance
- Zoning, development, and land use
- Banking and lending
- Common property and prenuptials
- Probate and capital gains
Identifying problems and creating content, especially video, is a great way to win a listing before you’ve even set the appointment.
Your video can address how these issues and concerns directly dovetail into real estate opportunities and should be frontline to how you will market both yourself and your services.
Taken together, your branding as a luxury agent and creating creative ways to address common issues in the market will position you as an expert that becomes in high demand. By increasing demand for your services and providing individual solutions, you’re winning a listing before you even meet with the client.
3 Additional Ways To Guarantee You Win That Luxury Listing
Becoming the go-to luxury agent and winning luxury listings go hand-in-hand.
Branding yourself as a luxury expert and adopting a luxury lifestyle helps you project the image of being a luxury expert.
1. Know The Global Luxury Market
Being perceived as a global luxury agent expert is crucial to helping you win the listing. Whether you’ve never listed a luxury home before or have a few dozen under your belt, how you are perceived is vital to winning the listing.
To be perceived as a luxury expert, you must adopt the lifestyle and portray luxury as your brand. However, that perception will only be good enough to get you into the door.
How you win the listing includes a strategy that showcases your knowledge and experience and a detailed plan on how you will market the property to get top-dollar for your client.
Understanding the global luxury market takes experience and precise knowledge. To achieve these attributes, you may need to partner with someone much more experienced than you, such as a mentor or senior partner at your brokerage.
The role of your partnership is to help you learn the ins and outs of the global market, what to look for, and how to package that information to help your client, all the while enhancing your reputation as a luxury agent.
One reason your knowledge of the luxury market is so crucial is that there likely aren’t similar homes in your immediate area to perform an accurate market comparison report.
Understanding the value of the architecture, the return on the upgrades, and the exclusivity that often accompanies a luxury property will help you educate your potential client about the actual value of their home, further enhancing your perception as a luxury expert.
2. Have A Pool Of Potential Foreign Buyers
Industry market research shows that over 50% of all luxury home sales are from foreign buyers. Therefore, establishing a process highlighting luxury homes to a global client pool, their buying trends, and the value of domestically and internationally marketing is a good strategy when you pitch a luxury listing.
For example, you want to show your potential seller statistical value to open their listing to a global market. Delve into the research and produce market reports highlighting the volume of homes sold to foreign buyers and other data points highlighting the need to market to these buyers.
Presenting your potential client with data that shows the value of international and domestic buying trends is only the first start. You must then show your potential client that you will be able to deliver a buyer or a buyer representative, such as an agent, to procure a deal.
The best way to do this is to network with other agents specializing in foreign clients, work with brokers specializing in global luxury real estate, and have a strategy to get the listing to the top of luxury home search results.
Ideally, you’d also provide a list of potential buyers you have communicated with to show the seller your outreach as their listing agent.
3. Create A Marketing Strategy To Push The Home To The Top Of Search Results
As you’ve developed your reputation and shown the client the value you may bring as a listing agent, the next step, which is the most important, is to show how you will market the home and make it the luxury property that buyers will be clamoring to buy.
This will take a precise strategy that includes highlighting the home on premier luxury real estate websites, elegant marketing materials, and how you plan on making their listing achieve top status for all luxury real estate searches.
Your marketing approach should have multiple tiers to it. For example, you must have detailed, well-written descriptions for listing services and attractive home photos. Consider 3D interactive marketing and video to highlight what makes the property unique.
Remember, pitching an owner of a luxury property is similar and dissimilar to pitching to a traditional home seller. Luxury clients are used to elite, white-glove service, and you need to showcase those abilities just to break down the barriers and resistance they may have in working with you as an agent.
Much of your strategy should focus on cultivating your representation as an elite listing agent and showcasing what makes your services unique from the other agent’s pitching.
Winning a listing as an agent in the luxury market requires a specific type of expertise, considerable networking skills, and a reputation for superior expertise. In addition, you need to position yourself as the best solution to selling your home, and you do that in the way you brand every activity and transaction in which you’re involved.
Highlighting your skills to showcase the client’s home, complete with a list of potential domestic and international buyers, is the strategy you need to take when working on winning a luxury listing. Building your brand and heightening your exposure is a surefire way to increase your reputation as a local luxury real estate expert.
Ultimately, winning every luxury listing means three things. One, you need to be a local luxury expert.
Two, provide elite service in every interaction with your client, as that is what they expect and are the most accustomed to.
Three, you need to understand the finer details that separate the luxury real estate market from the traditional one.
