Douglas Magazine Spotlights Firm’s Toniest Listings
A prominent Beverly Hills-based real estate firm has launched a $10-a-copy magazine to show off its for-sale homes, the latest salvo fired by competing realtors in the high-stakes battle for dominance in the nation’s priciest housing market--Los Angeles’ Westside.
The first issue of Jon Douglas Co.’s Douglas Properties International was published earlier this month, with 63 full-color pages of properties in the $1-million to $21-million range that agents with the firm are trying to sell.
Although most of the homes and estates are in the tony Westside enclaves of Beverly Hills, Bel-Air and Malibu, a few are in other ritzy areas of Southern California. One--at a paltry $2.5 million--is in Versailles, France.
The magazine was unveiled at a swank Beverly Hills restaurant as 200 attendees--including top brokers from several firms, reporters and movie stars--sipped champagne and munched on caviar, salmon, filet mignon and shrimp.
A Douglas-hired camera crew videotaped the event for use in the company’s marketing efforts.
The new publication is unprecedented, real estate experts say, because it is the first top-quality magazine an independent West Coast brokerage firm has published that exclusively touts its own listings.
But those same experts disagreed over whether the $150,000 that the Douglas company will spend every three months to print 15,000 copies of the magazine will be money well spent.
A few of the other Westside real estate companies--most notably, Fred Sands Realtors and Merrill Lynch/Rodeo Realty--advertise in similarly lush magazines. However, those magazines feature advertisements from several firms, not just one.
“We felt that we needed a really top-quality publication that would shine the spotlight only on us and our listings,” said Lou Piatt, Jon Douglas Co.’s executive vice president.
Although a handful of the new magazines will be sold to the public by subscription, Piatt said most will be given away to potential buyers. The company has targeted homeowners in affluent Southland areas, previous clients, brokerage houses, business managers and other professionals who work with wealthy American and foreign investors.
The magazine’s success may well depend on exactly who gets it, real estate consultants say.
“They better have a good, targeted mailing list (of potential buyers) or their money will be wasted,” said Barbara Pivnicka, a spokeswoman for the Roulac Real Estate Consulting Group in San Francisco.
“If this thing goes out to 15,000 people who aren’t looking for a home or can’t afford this kind of house, it’s $150,000 down the drain--every three months.”
However, Sanford Goodkin, a Los Angeles-based real estate consultant, said the new Douglas publication isn’t such a big gamble.
Ads Pay Dividends
“If Jon Douglas sells just one home through this publication, the commission is going to more than pay for its cost,” Goodkin said.
Indeed, realtors who advertise frequently in upscale magazines say the ads often pay huge dividends--sometimes from unlikely sources.
Veteran Westside realtor Fred Sands remembers when a wealthy investor saw an ad Sands’ firm had placed for a multimillion-dollar property in Estates, a slick magazine of homes that draws advertisements from dozens of high-end real estate firms.
“This guy was out on his yacht in the Pacific, thumbing through the magazine,” Sands said. “He saw a home he liked, called us on the ship-to-shore phone and bought the house.”
Brokers and consultants alike said it’s too early to tell whether the new Jon Douglas publication will result in similar sales success. “It’s a bold move, but I think it’s an excellent idea,” said Mike Glickman, whose brokerage firm is one of Douglas’ chief rivals. “Whether it will generate sales--well, only time will tell.”
Still, both Goodkin and Pivnicka said the real value in the new publication is the polish it will add to the image of Jon Douglas Co.
The company is well-known and generally well-regarded in its primary market area, which stretches from Santa Barbara to southern Los Angeles County. But like Fred Sands Realtors and many other high-end firms based on the Westside, Douglas is now trying to establish a national and international presence.
Image Enhancement
“The real value Douglas will get from this (new publication) is image enhancement,” Goodkin said. “The magazine looks good, so the company looks good.
“People are going to get the magazine in New York and Tokyo, and they’ll think of Jon Douglas.”
Indeed, realtor Piatt said many of the magazines will be sent to investors in Japan, Hong Kong and Taiwan--nations chock-full of investors who have been snapping up West Coast real estate because prices here pale in comparison to prices for homes in their countries.
The Sands and Douglas firms have already set up what are essentially joint marketing agreements with real estate offices in Tokyo, calling for Japanese agents to show clients overseas the listings that the American firms have in Beverly Hills and other high-end markets.
Boost Market Share
The new publication is produced by Prime Publishing Co. Inc., a respected Santa Barbara-based company that is perhaps best known for its upscale Prime Real Estate magazine.
The Douglas magazine is the latest in a string of new marketing tools that real estate brokerages in general--and firms on the Westside, in particular--have begun to use in an effort to boost their market share.
For example, several firms now videotape “walking tours” of their listings and show them to prospective buyers.
Buyers can watch the tapes in the realtors’ office or view them at home. Either way, the clients avoid the hassle of driving from one house to the next in the hope of finding one that suits their taste.
Other brokers are using “talking” real estate signs that allow drivers to pull up in front of a house, tune in a specified channel on the radio, and hear a recorded message describing what the home is like inside. Some firms are even buying blocks of time on television and cable TV to show properties they have listed.
Consultant Goodkin says such innovative marketing techniques are “only the tip of the iceberg.”
Foreign Investors
“You’ll see a lot more videos and more cable-TV shows, to be sure,” he said. “But over the next few years, you’ll also see these high-end firms start taking space in upscale department stores, like Nordstrom, to show off the properties they have for sale.”
More firms will also publish impressive magazines and send them to foreign investors, he said, and brokers will increasingly advertise in publications whose readers “have unusually high incomes and huge amounts of cash”--for example, The Economist, which is based in London, and the Paris-based International Herald Tribune.
“Those kitchen magnets and little note pads that realtors used to pass out for advertising just won’t cut it anymore,” Goodkin said. “At least, not if you’re a broker doing business on the Westside--and not if you’re trying to establish a global presence.”
