By JOE LIGHT
The Times-Union,
Marketing 10,000 homes at once is pretty tough, especially when most of those homes don’t yet exist. But, come January, one Realtor will try to do just that, and if the company has its way, home buyers searching for real estate in the Yulee region will no longer have to hit the streets and troll dozens of communities in search of the perfect fit.
In the latest home selling strategy to hit Jacksonville’s explosive building market, Prudential Chaplin Williams Realty is taking a novel approach — a one stop community shop for prospective Nassau residents weary of driving to dozens of new communities planned for the Yulee region.
Although people moving into a region generally drive to many different communities in search of the neighborhood that they will target and live in, in Yulee, where thousands of homes are planned along the A1A corridor, doing so has become a chore for potential residents.
Jim Ewing, who manages Prudential Chaplin Williams’ Mainland Market Center in Yulee, decided to try to bring the flavor of all of those new communities under one roof, in a New Home Welcome Center slated to open in January. Ewing said that it’s the only one of its kind in Northeast Florida, and the center promises to cut down the driving time of new residents significantly as they use the New Home center to narrow down their search.
Officials at the Prudential office will receive a commission for every homebuyer that they refer to a builder for the purchase of a new home.
Prudential Chaplin Williams Realty’s center is part of a growing trend in real estate and new home sales that foregoes the traditional drive-by buyer sales model for a more convenient, and some say more effective, retail model.
If a customer chooses a community constructed by certain homebuilders, their retail real estate experience might not end there. KB Home, for example, has customers choose their floorplans and home features not in the builder’s office, but in another retail setting — the KB Home studio, which includes price tags, with estimated additional monthly payments, on every item.
Connie Braithwaite, one of Watson Custom Home Builders’ sales people for Nassau County, said that the developer saw the New Home Center as a good way to make sure home buyers kept Watson in mind when looking for a new home.
“It really is about having a one stop shop for these neighborhoods,” she said.
The new sales model could save days for a new home buyer, accustomed to visiting many model homes and real estate offices to sort out their neighborhood options, said David Parker, a principal for Parker and Associates, a Jacksonville-based real estate development marketing consultant.
“Going to model homes is a very time-consuming business,” he said. “You can narrow it down to three or four neighborhoods to tour instead of the 14 or 15 that you would normally.”
Parker said that he designed and opened a similar type of store in St. Augustine but closed it after a year due to insufficient customer traffic. He said that his company did not invest enough money in the center to make it work.
“Normally, you have to rely completely on the salesman or agent to sort out houses you might want,” he said. “This is an idea borne out of sitting around a table and asking, ‘How can you do it better?’”
joe.lightjacksonville.com, (904) 359-4689
