Walk on into 2022.

Where does the future of sales suite walk-ins lie, not only for the remainder of 2022 but for the years ahead?

Walk-ins. Your face to face, bricks and mortar, traditional sales practice, and for our estate managers at Core the greatest part of their job! The topic of conversation on a Monday morning across the property industry is enquiry, deposits and walk-ins. In simple terms: We want numbers.?*Queue estate managers’ response.*

At Core, sales deposits and transactions showed a strong return post-Christmas holiday closures. The March period saw Core communities achieve similar deposits YoY to 2021 despite no Federal stimulus, a looming uncertainty to interest rate rises, an upcoming Federal election, and the global unrest that unfolded over the first quarter of 2022. On a digital marketing front, budgets across all projects and corridors had to work harder as enquiry trended downwards on the back of a fiery Q4 period.

February saw a peak in ad performance in terms of both ‘cost per lead’ values, and enquiry numbers. Across Core communities the average ‘click-through rate’ to digital campaigns more than doubled MoM over February, this theme continuing in March, further demonstrating there is still a strong appetite for land in 2022, with large numbers of buyers still actively searching.??

So, Walk-ins. Let’s discuss:

Coming off the back of the stop-start covid environment of 2020 & 2021, there’s no question that walk-in traffic has not yet returned to pre-pandemic levels. For the time being, gone are the days of overnight campouts for a Saturday morning release of ‘15 new lots’ – today, we have online ballots and ticketed systems, where transactions continue to be made and paid via an online portal. How do we then land home buyers at the front door of our sales suites, where our estate managers can further enhance the purchaser’s experience through a well-curated customer journey, swindling preference from competing Estates? Or is it just not as important in 2022? Everything is online, right??

While it’s proving harder to get people off their sofas now, as marketers we need to facilitate creativity. Just look to the new world of retail and dining emerging off the back of the pandemic, with multisensory and technologically innovative experiences cutting through that industry?(Check out Sublimotion, Dubai or The Mayflower restaurant in Sydney leading to this theme). Will property be next to jump on board? With other industries exploring the use of tech in customer sales experience elements, there becomes the expectation from our customers to meet them this way in the property sales journey– particularly as this is a purchase of someone’s greatest and highest value asset.??

Curating the in-person sales journey is something the team at?DisplaySweet?is all too familiar with, as a nationally prominent supplier in prop-tech, they play a major influence in the sales suite customer experience. With innovative tailor-made presentation apps that can sync to a CRM while facilitating a visual presentation, this technology is becoming widely prevalent and more important than ever before for master planned communities. Speaking with Lachlan Hudson, VIC & SA Account Manager at DisplaySweet, Lachlan mentions the importance of understanding and treating each project differently?“there’s no one size fits all”.?One of the key benefits of their app is that it allows for a sales presentation to be personalised to?“what actually matters to each selected customer segment”.

Aside from this, the data capture is highly desirable to marketers, guiding future moves, and the experience it provides provokes conversation and word of mouth, placing your project brand in front of a greater audience (queue ROI). Another item Lachlan notices trending on land developers’ shopping lists so far into 2022 are immersion rooms, which offer life-scale experiences of property floorplans, or further spaces such as local parks or residents clubs or centres. These sales tools really something different making your sales suite worth a weekend drive.

In short, when we look to multi-industries and what’s guiding consumer interest, it becomes clear that immersive, tech led innovation for the on-ground customer experience will be integral in guiding walk-in behaviours – not to mention facilitating positive team conversations when it comes to the numbers game on a Monday.