Bond reaches out to Asian buyers

Bond New York has launched a Chinese-language section on its website in an effort to attract Asian investors and buyers, Crain’s reported. It is also embarking on a Web marketing campaign to identify the brokerage and the wider New York market to Chinese-speaking buyers overseas.

Bond is not the first brokerage to target foreign buyers. Marketing firm Prodigy Network allows visitors to switch its website to Spanish from English. The Corcoran Group’s site lets clients search for agents who speak a total of 29 foreign languages and Halstead, meanwhile, lists speakers of 19 languages.

“There are lots of Asian investors looking for property information who prefer to use their own language,” said Michael Chen, Bond’s director of Asian market development, who came up wit the idea for the Chinese section.  “We have to put a message out there that tells them that we have the capability to serve them.”

Noah Freedman, co-founder of Bond, added: “We launched a Chinese-language section to better service this community, and we understand the importance of growing our brand within China, Taiwan, and other parts of the Pacific Rim.”

The Chinese population also accounts for 5.4 percent of the New York City’s population.

Last year, it was reported that the Chinese art of Feng Shui was playing a bigger role in New York real estate as foreign buyers began to populate the market. [Crain’s]