Stuy Town’s new “ahead of the game,” yet “strange,” marketing strategy

In a bid to attract market-rate tenants, Stuy Town is getting a little bit weird.

The development has outfitted a 22-foot-long truck at a cost of $150,000 to serve as a kind of display home-on-wheels in a bid to attract a new crowd, according to the New York Times.

Driving aroun dmostly in Brooklyn–and particularly neighborhoods that will affected by the L-train’s shutdown– the truck is supposed to allow leasing agents to give interested parties impromptu tours of the transparent truck, which has been renovated to resemble Stuy Town’s typical one or two-bedroom units.

“A lot of this is about the cool factor,” said Rick Hayduk, the CEO of Stuy Town’s property manager, StuyTown Property Services, to the Times.

The truck has been in service since late April at a monthly cost of about $100,000 and, though it hasn’t been proven to generate any new leases so far, StuyTown’s chief operating officer Kelly Vohs says the boost to the development’s reputation has already been worth the expense.

“We want people to see the truck and think, ‘A company that is going to do that, that’s clever, that’s not what I thought about StuyTown,’” Vohs explained to the Times. “It’s a very noisy media landscape. How can we be different from what else is being done?” [NYT] — Erin Hudson