Yoo hoo. If you are thinking about selling a luxury home anytime soon, well, clear your calendar for June 19 and 20. Realtors from across North America, even and a few from Canada, will be coming here for a special two-day luxury home training session offered by The Institute for Luxury Home Marketing® (ILHM). The ILHM is the largest training and research organization serving luxury real estate sales professionals internationally and it’s located here in Dallas. The training will be offered June 19th and 20th and will be hosted sponsored by Great Western Home Loans. It is wide open to agents regardless of their company affiliation.
If you are not an agent but would like to get in, never fear: your’s truly plans on being there and will spill all the beans right here on CandsyDirt.com, like we always do.
The training results in membership in ILHM and is the first step in earning the prestigious (for realtors) Certified Luxury Home Marketing Specialist® (CLHMS) designation. The training will be conducted by the Institute‘s Founder and CEO, Laurie Moore-Moore, who I had the pleasure of getting to know last summer after she moderated a panel of top real estate movers and shakers: Mike Brodie, Jennifer Miller, Jan Richey and Briggs-Freeman Sotheby’s chieftain Robbie Briggs. Like the upcoming one, the panel discussion was led by Laurie Moore-Moore, of the Institute for Luxury Home Marketing. You can see a wee bit of Laurie in the photo above.
And yes, her last name is Moore-Moore, you are not chewing too much Doublemint gum.
Here’s the takeaway from her panel last summer: the most important rule for any agent to know is that old-fashioned personal contact with a client trumps everything — that’s the old part of the equation. You just cannot minimize that personal and individual contact. So if you are not getting this out of your agent, well, speak up and tell them to get with it!
The second part, the “new”, is web presence which is not just critical, but crucial in today’s market. (Laurie is a huge believer in the power of the web.) Also of being in touch with everyone via email, text, Twitter, Skype, all of it.
Laurie also told agents to “put a spin on it”, that is, use relevant names like “relevant listings” instead of “comps”. And get rid of all of a property’s negatives immediately by finding the lemonade in the lemon: say a home has a very small yard, well, say that right from the start — this smaller yard is perfect for empty nesters or DINKs, double income no kids.
Agents listen up: the training is also good for sixteen units of elective credits toward the National Association of Realtors’ Certified Residential Specialist (CRS) designation. All brought to you for freebie ONLY $550 by those fun folks at Great Western Mortgage.
“The training focuses on working with buyers and sellers in the top 10% of the residential market,” says Institute founder Laurie Moore-Moore. “Today’s post-recession luxury market is very different and requires new strategies and skills on the part of the real estate professional. This training focuses on what’s important for success today.”
The two day course includes information on the post-recession mindset of luxury buyers and sellers, special competencies required to serve the affluent, exclusive research information on how to reach and best serve the wealthy, and effective new ideas for marketing luxury homes and estates.
For more information or to register, go here.
