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Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/1508543
pre-sales marketing has typi- cally worked. "Pre-sales condos became a thing in the 1980s, but most work is outsourced," she says. "Things would get built, then you call in the marketer." Riley's team now gets in- volved from the beginning, doing work to research what buyers are going to want in the future, which might be very dif- ferent from what they bought four years ago and are just moving into now. But it's a tricky thing. No one asks you to buy cars or vacuum cleaners or frozen pizzas on spec. But that's the model here in Vancouver for this major buy. "We're selling air. Ether. So it's built on trust," said Riley. (For more on BPI, see our inter- view with executive vice-presi- dent Sally Parrott on p.22.) I've had a hard time under- standing the concept of devel- oper branding (possibly the reason that I'm in journalism and not marketing or public relations) since I started hear- ing about it a while ago. That's likely because I think of brand- ing as being for a different kind of product: toasters, cold rem- edies, cereal, bikes. Products that you buy more than, say, once in your lifetime, and where you'll get reviews from multiple friends about whether they were reliable or broken down; whether they worked properly or didn't; whether they tasted good. How do you brand an en- tire development company? The thing is, condos and new homes of all descriptions are hard to assess. Consumer Reports doesn't touch them, though they do provide cau- tionary advice about home- owner associations. There is nothing like an Edmunds car ranking system or a CARFAX or Kelley Blue Book estimate of a car's resale value, which takes into account how solid a prod- uct it was to begin with. Potential buyers work in an information desert. They can go on vague impressions and news stories about past specific problems (defaults, prominent lawsuits or, more specifically, the case of Holborn and the bad taste left over its purchase of the Little Mountain social- housing site) or developer per- sonalities (such as Ian Gillespie at Westbank: flamboyant, very design- and detail-focused). They can scour the extremely complex documents provided with pre-sales, which can be so unreadable that a buyer might not even realize there's some quirky provision (developer has provided himself with a penthouse on top that is its own separate air parcel) baked in. Or they could try looking up past court cases, where they'll discover anywhere from zero to 179 lawsuits in B.C. Supreme Court judgments associated with various top development companies in the region. It would be helpful to have that kind of data in the cur- rent real estate world in this city, even for developers, as pre-sales have become tough- er and more competitive. Buyers didn't use to ask who the builder was. But they're starting to pay much more attention, according to Max Jakubke of marketing agency Publish Partners. "In a hot market, people didn't care," Jakubke says. "But now the marketers have noticed people are asking more questions about the builders. Are they local? They're coming back three or four times and are more thoughtful about buy- ing. They're not camping out any more." A sign of the times, besides the focus on branding, is the emergence of a company like MLA Blue, which offers a ser- vice rating of homes for sale. Part of the firm's "blue score" is a focus on the developer, which is rated "based on number of units completed, years of experience, Google rating and survey responses from our real estate agent database." But those seem like incom- plete metrics for a purchase that is likely to be the largest one ever in many people's lives. So branding has to go beyond that. Like several other big local companies, BPI emphasizes its long time in the market—started by an earlier generation and now being carried on by the children of the founders. But it also closely tracks customer satisfaction post-move, using tools like the Net Promoter Score system. The messaging it has developed is not just for the buyers of its condos—the statements about goals and ideals are meant to serve as a guide for its own employees. And it touts its clean record when it comes to defaults and its practice of requiring higher deposits in pre-sales. That last one might seem contradictory, but that's because developers have more than one audience they're try- ing to reach with their brand- ing messages. Development companies need a strong iden- tity as good players for other key audiences: the politicians who will approve their proj- ects, the government officials who will decide on what kind of program money they might get and the banks and equity partners that provide the money to build. The message to those audi- ences is especially crucial these days, when many developers are putting projects on hold be- cause they can't get financing in this era of high interest rates, complicated rezoning process- es, constantly climbing con- struction costs and hesitation among potential buyers having trouble getting mortgages. It turns out the company's identity has to sell not just po- tential buyers, but the people who will make it possible to build at all, says Riley. "Our most important customers are our lenders," she notes. £ ( the informer ) ISTOCK 16 BCBUSINESS.CA OCTOBER 2023