Andrew Gerringer, managing director of the development marketing group at Prudential Douglas Elliman.
As told to Lauren Elkies
Since I have worked on more than 225 projects since 1994, you get a feel for what’s the right way to approach different situations. So it’s very hard for me as a marketing agent when a developer doesn’t want to take advice that comes from experience. We have to convince them that really, we are on their side.
We had a situation where a developer was trying to market his own project in Chelsea. In an extremely hot market, he wasn’t successful in selling his units because his product was all wrong. He said to us, “Look, I need help.”
We had meeting after meeting after meeting and showed him comparables, and convinced him that the right approach was to do a complete redesign of the building. We even did a new launch with a different name. He fought us for a while because no one really wants to have to shut down the product after it’s been open.
We also encountered difficulties when marketing a building on Park Avenue South. The building was crying out for large units, but we knew in that market, which was not a family area, that it wasn’t a market at the time that you should be building too many large units for.
The developer was second-guessing us about what size units should be done there. We spent countless hours trying to convince the developer that smaller units were better. That required many calls during days, nights, weekends — you name it.
He agreed to make smaller units, and it went very well.
These are examples of where we really had to carry them along. We had some heated discussions about what the best approach should be, but you can’t yell and scream at them. We don’t want to fight with our clients, but we will very strongly impress upon them our opinions.
We have had to resign from three projects out of the 225, due to unprofessional conduct on behalf of the developer or an inability to get on the same page as far as pricing and product.
Because developers are the owners, they want to have the final say, which obviously at the end of the day they do. While we do understand it’s their project, we’re really all on the same side. We do not get paid until the closings occur. That’s why I really believe that our interests are particularly aligned.
As a marketing agent, it’s our job to justify why a project is right or why it is not right. Our goal is to make apartments saleable. At the end of the day, that’s what it’s about.
Clifford Finn, managing director of new development marketing at Citi Habitats.
As told to Lauren Elkies
Though it’s infrequent, some developers are difficult because of ego, and others are difficult because they have a strong conviction about their vision, which does not match the specific target audience we are looking for. Sometimes, it’s both.
Owners feel very strongly about what they like, so we fight for what we really believe is important, and we compromise on other things and hope that compromise is still going to work.
We’re the voice of the buyer, but we’re also imposing our own taste level as well. Because there are so many people on a project that have opinions, it can be like having too many chefs in the kitchen.
One difficult situation presented itself when we wanted to do three model apartments for a project, and the developer had a decorator friend whom he wanted to use. The decorator knew how to do personal apartments, not model apartments, which are two very different things. The developer’s friend did the job, and it didn’t work. We had to bring in the decorator we wanted from the start. The minute we went in and redid the models, all of a sudden the absorption started picking up and the units starting moving.
With some developers, budgeting issues present a problem, like when we try to put together a brochure and marketing package and the developers don’t want to spend a lot of money on them. They don’t allot the appropriate amount of money, or they start cutting the budget as we’re putting the materials together. Those developers aren’t realizing that in the end, they will have to spend the money because presentation is everything.
We have to quantify the effect the additional spending will have on revenue. Sometimes, you can quantify it in terms of additional revenues in a very black-and-white way. Other times, it’s more difficult because it affects things like retention, absorption or simply attracting a more qualified buyer or renter.
Developer scrutiny does not pose a problem. Actually, it’s the opposite — when developers see a concept in the beginning and say it is good, then don’t get involved in the planning, and then show up late in the game and say it’s not going to work. I’d rather have them there at every meeting.
We’ve been actively involved with 30 projects, and agreed there has been only one where we had to walk away from it. The developer was converting a building from a rental to a condo and continuously kept changing the rules with us and changing the scope of the project. We couldn’t work on it anymore, and we walked away. It just became more difficult than it was worth.