HOW homes are marketed is big business and trends are changing to not only sell bricks and mortar, but also a lifestyle.
The property market is often a sign of the state of the local economy and entrepreneurs building businesses in this industry are risk takers.
Mira Weiner and Jaco Badenhorst had seen a business opportunity to market high-end properties in a unique way when established their business, the Property Influencer Co. (Pico) on June 1.
Badenhorst was born and raised in the property market, his father Ian Badenhorst was his mentor and was the principal and director of Seeff Country.
Weiner is a young, vibrant marketer and entrepreneur who earned her stripes in the real estate trade as the founder of her own hospitality and property management businesses early in her 20s.
Together they have a vision that Pico will create a universal method for the property industry to market and sell properties differently.
Badenhorst said: “There’s a lot of people looking for the new silver bullet of property and this is an industry that has been done the same way for the last twenty of thirty years and I think that there is new ways of selling property and marketing property that we are not going into.”
He added: “It’s about changing the way that people market property but also changing the way that you create the dream of living in a property, not just selling these stagnant photos and listing on big websites that we all know.”
Weiner said: “What we hope to achieve is to move more away from the traditional open house days. To create exclusive online events with luxury brands, we will bring in fashion, art, food, drink and jewellery brands into a home and have these curated experiences.”
Using famous faces and luxury brands to sell the lifestyle of properties is what they believe is the future of the high-end property market. The pair have set their sights on local and international buyers and steadily growing their business.
Pam Golding Properties senior research analyst Sandra Gordon said there’s been greater demand for security estate living from high net worth buyers as lifestyle choices drive buyers in South Africa.
“In Gauteng, unit sales in estates valued at under R1.5 million declined from 73.9% of total estate sales in 2010 to just under half (49.5%) by 2020, while the percentage of top-end (>R3 million) units sold more than doubled, rising from 6.7% in 2010 to 17.6% in 2020,” said Gordon.
She added: “The distribution of estate homes sold according to price bands is very similar in the Western Cape. The total of homes priced below R1.5 million was higher in the Western Cape in 2010 but by 2020 was in line with Gauteng at around half of all estate homes sold in both regions.”
Property expert and head of the Realtor of Excellence group Toni Enderli, who is currently in Switzerland, said his business had created a network for buyers in Europe and the US looking to purchase property in SA.
He said: “European and American clients are looking at Cape Town and South Africa and they get a lot more for their euros and dollars here and I have built a bridge to market these properties online through social media and we are selling the lifestyle for the value for money. We have been doing that for the last year and that's what people are buying into, the lifestyle.”
Enderli said the local market was still undergoing change.
“There’s one property right now in the centre of Cape Town, they paid R9m and they are willing to let it go now for R6m – thats a huge cut but they want to get out of that property because they hedged themselves and there is a lot of that in Cape Town and will continue over the next 12 months.
“I don’t see capital growth going higher in the luxury market for the next 24 months but the growth is going to be with the people who can pay cash and they are picking up the bargains.”