One Main Street – a new condominium mid-rise in downtown Bellevue, WA.
Matrix Real Estate stepped in as the exclusive marketing and sales team for One Main Street in March of 2010 after an original launch in 2008. One Main Street is a boutique building of 57 homes in one of the best locations in Bellevue, Old Main Street. When Matrix took over the listings and marketing, there were 50 homes left to sell with 29 different floor plans. The market was well into the downturn, buyers were unsure, lenders were not lending on condominium projects that were less than 50% sold and the competition, particularly Bellevue Towers, was making significant changes to pricing, as well as their sales and marketing program in order to sell inventory.
The Matrix team rolled up their sleeves and took on the challenges. Leslie Williams and Mike Miller shopped the financing market to identify a lender that would facilitate closings of both existing and new home sales prior to the property achieving the typical lender requirement for 50% presales. Additionally, with the assistance of the developer and the newly identified lender, Matrix obtained project approval from both Fannie Mae and FHA so that when market-wide presale requirements were achieved One Main Street had the best financing available in the market.
Then began the art of selling. Matrix focused on the experience of living at One Main Street in Old Bellevue. We upsold our unique building and home features, location and quality of construction to compete with lower priced homes in the market. Each week, the team targeted individual homes to sell, and focused model home staging to demonstrate the livability of the most unique floor plans in order to balance floorplan inventory through the sell-out.
This selling process took a lot of work on the part of the Matrix team. The team thought through market dynamics, buyer profile and psychology, practicality of financing, and importantly, the strengths and weaknesses of the One Main Street offering. The question was: How can we best communicate the value proposition? The key and unique solution to answering the question was role playing. We planned and practiced it. Everything from meet-and-greet, qualifying, explanation of features, selling benefits, and closing on value proposition. One particular challenge was how to target and minimize the number of homes showed to individual buyers. With so many floor plans buyers could stray. We role-played how to interview potential buyers to define and minimize the number of homes and time taken to show homes. Through this process of role playing we refined methods to deliver customer needs and sell against the competition confidently, never letting down on our value proposition.
Cost-efficient marketing strategies were utilized such as targeted online sources to maximize reach while minimizing expense. Matrix handled all marketing services and ad placement, originally working with Effective Design Studio. We capitalized on sales momentum through our social media and e-mail campaign, always developing new leads, staying in front of our prospect database, and supporting the local real estate brokerage community.
The original onsite team handled the entire two-year sell-out. Through consistency of message and the team believing strongly in the offering we were able to sell against the competition and maintain the values of the building, never giving in to anything less than delivering the best value proposition in the market.
