By Mike Akerly of Village Confidential
One year ago our team was working with a buyer who had fallen in love with a condo building on Central Park West in Manhattan. It had everything he was looking for – the ability to rent the apartment out to a tenant, a location across the street from Central Park, a doorman, reasonable common charges, and beautiful art deco design. The buyer was prepared to spend up to $5mil to purchase his ideal investment property and would not require financing. The only problem – there was no appropriate unit on the market!
We decided to take an unconventional approach and mail the owners of the building with a friendly introduction to our buyer and his investment criteria. We mailed both resident and absentee owners in the building. After a couple of weeks, we received a few responses to our unsolicited offers, but nothing ever came together. Six months later, we went into contract with our client on a nearby building two blocks from the park. You would have thought that was the end of the story.
Last week we received a phone call from a woman who lives outside of New York City but owns a condo in the Central Park West building we mailed. She had saved our letter from last year and wanted to speak to us because her current tenant’s lease will terminate in September and she’s thinking about putting the condo on the market. Though I haven’t seen the interior of the apartment yet, the comps suggest the property is probably worth about $2.5mil. We have a pitch meeting with the owner on Wednesday.
I think there are two lessons to be taken away from this situation: 1) mailing absentee owners may be an interesting marketing strategy worth putting some time into; and 2) you never know when you will see a Return on Investment for your marketing efforts. In this case, it took one year.
Comments(4)