World of Mouth Referrals

Several years ago I was videotaping real estate classes for a branch sales manager in Northern Virginia, Dennis Bruce. He made a statement that I remember clearly to this day: “Agents don’t sell houses; houses sell themselves. Agents need to open the door, turn on the lights and get out of the way.” Dennis went on to say that when agents have done a thorough buyer analysis, and they have personally previewed the existing available inventory, making the match between buyers and the home they will buy is not some random process of elimination.  Dennis believes that houses speak to people, and I believe he is right.

There is a very unusual home in Fairfax Station, Virginia, called Terra Uchi – which literally translated from Japanese means “inside the earth.” It was designed and built by Richard Hibbert and his wife Jennie with the help of high school boys over the period of 1980 – 1983.  The Lorton Valley Star newspaper did a beautiful and thorough feature story on the home’s Passive Solar Design titled Green Before Its Time in February of 2009.

As I walked through Terra Uchi on Sunday, the house was speaking to me.  The details of design and construction – from the reinforced concrete walls to the cabinets made from trees felled on the property – all spoke of great care and spaces created for specific purposes.  When the listing agent,  Mary Wharton, flipped on the light in the darkroom, I could feel the hours that had passed in that long narrow room developing photos.  As I walked across the warm wooden floors I was captivated by the patterns of light on the walls as it streamed through the levered windows, by the stone used throughout the house, and the functional details of a home thoroughly lived in.

Dennis walked through the house too, talking of how a shift here or something different there would better suit his taste.  He and the house were having a different conversation than the one I was having with it. As we continued to walk through the house and the grounds, I kept thinking: “Somewhere out there in the world is someone waiting to fall in love with this home – just as it’s original owners loved it.” I am convinced these people exist.  So the question now becomes: “How do you find these people?”

Marketing something extraordinary and unusual is a challenge.  This is not a cookie-cutter builder’s concept designed to meet a data driven buyer profile.  It’s not a high end estate property that would show well in a glossy magazine.  This home needs to be “experienced” because the photos don’t speak the way the wood does as you walk into the outdoor tea house with it’s Japanese style lights strung over the decking.  Hearing the rustle of leaves, smelling the earth it’s built under, touching the stone walls and seeing the view from the master bedroom is something that requires being fully “there.”

In the YouTube video Social Media Revolution, which I frequently show as part of my presentations on social media,  a point is made about how “word of mouth” has become “WORLD of mouth.”  We have networks that extend across many groups and great reaches of geography.  Suddenly we have all become search engines for the people who know us – bringing our networks things they are searching for and also bringing them information they don’t know exists.

The challenge of marketing a home as unique as Terra Uchi brings all of this into focus. Will traditional methods of real estate marketing be enough to find the future owners of this home? Perhaps not.  I believe the people waiting to fall in love with this house may not even be actively looking for another home.  But in some way they are connected to people who know someone who knows someone else who heard about the story this home has to tell.  I believe when a story is worth telling, it gets told and re-told often.

Do you have someone you would share this story with? That becomes the central truth of world-of-mouth marketing no matter what service or product we are selling.  We need to learn the craft of storytelling all over again to compete for the attention of those we are trying to reach.  Social media might be the new conduit by which we reach out to our “target markets” but that makes the value of the content all the more important. How will you learn to tell your story well?