Marketing Overview of Love Real Estate Agents - Case Study Example

Love Real Estate Agents Name Course Name Date Introduction Melbourne City like any other city in the world has people who need residential services. There are various companies within Melbourne established to meet these critical consumer needs. Love Real Estate Agents is a company with an objective of providing housing, commercial and industrial services. This paper evaluates the housing needs of different market segments and determines whether the products provided by the Love Real Estate Agents matches their needs and wants. In this perspective, the paper provides an overview of the company describing its products and the different segments that the company target. The residential category of the products that he company have been diversely discussed to increase the understanding of how the company brands its products for the targeted market. Love Real Market Segmentation, is extensively discussed. There are also company competitors who compete for the same market and thus they are also discussed. Consequently, using the 4p marketing strategy, the paper discusses the activities that the company undertakes to make sure that customer demands are met. At the conclusion the paper offers recommendations that Love Real Estates Agents need to take into implement in order to increase their profitability and hence maintain competitiveness. Company Overview Love Real Estate Agents is a renowned real estate company operating in the North of Melbourne City. It is regarded as the company that provides real estate solution to Melbourne residents (Love Real Estate 2010 d). The Love Real Estate Agents Company was established in the year 1945, and it has been in operation for more than sixty years (Love Real Estate 2010 d). The company has grown in the Northern Suburbs of Melbourne city and as at now it operates six residential offices at Thornbury, Reservoir, Preston, Thomastown, Mill Park and Epping. Consequently, the company deals in two separate commercial and industrial real estate offices found at Bayswater and Reservoir. The company is committed to meeting the best results for both buyers and vendors (Love Real Estate 2010 d). Product Category From the above overview it is evident that Love Real Estate Agents deals in two main product categories; the residential Estates and commercial/industrial estates. This paper will only discuss the residential real estates (Love Real Estate 2010 c). Love Real residential estates are located in the suburbs of Melbourne city. These estates are built in quietly achieving locations that are essential for virtues of urban life, privacy and amenity. These homes are best for both retired seniors who enjoy the peace that the quiet atmospheres provide and young families that value security and opportunities for prosperity in life that these estates offer (Love Real Estate 2010 c). The older working class is another class provided with a sense of neighbourhood, while the young generation’s aspirations of being part of a prosperous, vibrant, and diverse community are met. The estates are also built within affordable areas of the inner Melbourne city. Accordingly, Love Real Estates provide a sense of community to the residents, for instance, from Thornbury to Alphington; the rich transport options, suitable commercial premises, and entertainment precincts are facilities ideal for community life. The homes provided by the Love Real Estate agents are built to provide comfort, convenience, and practicality; there are comfortable open living areas complete with spacious backyards (Love Real Estate 2010 c). Competitors Market competition is the rivalry among different companies selling similar or substitute products in order to increase their profitability. In essence, it is the effort of two or more companies acting independently to secure the business of a third party through offering better or favourable terms. Love Real Estate Agents are faced with competition from other companies offering the same products. The commercial agencies that compete with Love Real Estates include: Galldon Real Estate Company, Greg Hocking City Residential Company, and Harcourts City Residential Company. They also offer both residential and commercial estates. Segmentation Segmentation is the process of differentiating the entire market of a product or service into distinct market targets; for instance each of the segments represents a unique market that can be reached or accessed using discrete marketing mix (Donnelly & Peter, 2009). Target market or segment comprise of a group of customers that share similar needs or wants. Segmentation is usually determined by companies using demographic, geographic, psychographic, or behavioural factors. Market segmentation has the following benefits to the company: it helps the company to effectively focus on specific customers and thus helping it to better its returns. Consequently, it aids the company to increase its competitiveness; for instance, the company increases its chances of creating a stronger customer bases and thus making it harder for new competitors to enter the market (Roose, 2007). Similarly, the company uses market segmentation to expand its market; this is basically possible when using geographic factors for segmenting your market (Donnelly & Peter, 2009). Market segmentation also helps a company to retain its customers; for instance through the life cycle of a customer. The company will ultimately have better communication strategies to communicate to its customers; the marketing message will be coded for a specific group of people thus increasing its impact (Richard, 2004). Lastly, segmentation allows a company to increase its profitability; as already mentioned, it increases the competitiveness, brand recall, customer retention, brand equity and the overall company communication. These are key factors for attracting customers which in turn ensure the company’s competitive edge. Love Real Estate Agents uses demographic factors to segment their residential product market. For instance, they target older retired seniors, older working class and the young and employed with aspiration of living in a vibrant and prosperous community; those individuals with high aptitude of owning a home and living in a thriving and prosperous community. Target Market Strategy A marketing strategy always reflects the company’s best opinion with regard to how it can use its resources and skills to improve its profitability in the marketplace. It is the avenue that the company uses to accomplish its objectives to attain its goals (Donnelly & Peter, 2009). Owing to this fact, Love Real Estate Agents believe that their level of quality and technological amenities has placed it into a niche of its own. The marketing strategy together with advertising efforts is fully anchored on this understanding. The above discussed segments are easily accessed through local media like newspapers, publications, magazines, radio, television, frequent open house displays and billboards (Jain, Haley, Voola & Wickham, 2012). The company uses differentiated marking strategy; each residential apartment has its own unique features and hence the marketing of one apartment is specifically for that apartment. The trend in real estate industry across Melbourne and other cities in Australia are changing and hence technological advancement together with maintenance of the general outlook and conditions of the apartments is critical (Richard, 2004). Additionally, another significant trend observed is the adoption of higher density housing particularly in locations where the construction land is minimal due to urban boundaries and demarcations. Love Real Estates Agents is extremely focused to follow these trends as well as maintaining superb comfort levels that distinguishes it from other players in the market. The company main targets are older working class, and retired seniors. Each of these target markets appreciates quality, service, convenience, safety, comfort, and technological amenities. Generally, they need affordable quality of life that will enhance their livelihood. Retired seniors This market segment covets quietly achieving suburbs that present essential virtues of urban life, amenity, privacy and security. For instance, retired seniors enjoy spacious homes that offer the much needed peace where hustles of life are no longer a problem. Consequently, they need apartments where they can host extended families once in a while. Additionally, these apartments must be within there credit abilities (Love Real Estate 2010b). The proximity and accessibility to the city is also vital for them to do their shopping. Other amenities like schools, colleges and universities are also a matter that they put into consideration particularly for their siblings. With regard to this, Love Real Estate Agents have identified this market potential and thus have developed apartments that meet these needs. The residential estate in Thornbury and Reservoir offers exactly what this market segment needs (Love Real Estate 2010b). Older working Class This is a professional class and their apartment needs are slightly similar to the retired seniors. They need living environments that separates them from the noisy and dirt of inconvenience average apartment living (Love Real Estate 2010b). Furthermore, this group is on the way to owning a home and hence they need housing facility that will fulfil the desire of getting the quality that they desire. They value security and privacy while they bring up their families in education rich environment that encourage learning; their children need to acquire excellent education. Nearness to schools, colleges and higher learning institutions is ideal (Love Real Estate 2010b). Closeness to commercial premises, like cafes, pubs, restaurants, and entertainment precincts will ultimately give them a taste of life. Consequently, estates that offer them a sense of community give them an opportunity to socialize and co-relate. The love estates in Thornbury, Northcote, and Alphington have been specifically developed for this market segment. Product This is an item that is either tangible or intangible service that satisfies the consumer needs or wants. Marketers use the physical attributes of products together with the benefits offered to market product and differentiate them from competitors. Each product has a life-cycle that comprises of the growth, maturity, and eventual decline phases. In this regard, marketers must conduct extensive research to establish how long is the products’ life-cycle in order to focus on the different challenges that arise when the product goes through the mentioned stages. Consequently, marketers can expand their current product mix by increasing the number of product lines. In this regard, they must have different understanding on how to position the product, how to exploit company resources, how to exploit the brand, and how to configure the product mix in order for the products to complement each other. A brand is the most valuable asset for any corporation, brand owners work extra harder to carefully create shareholders value; it is a significant management technique that ascribes financial value to the brand and thus enabling marketing investment to be manageable. Branding is a vital concept in marketing as it can tremendously improve the business performance by giving a company a competitive edge (Jain, Haley, Voola & Wickham, 2012). In the same line of discussion, strong and well-defined brands build customer loyalty, drives sales, create brand value and ultimately it will catalyse the growth of the business (Richard, 2004). Consumers are always motivated to purchase brands that are well established and those that have value. Love Real Estate is an established brand and real estate investors and buyers have total recognition of this brand in Melbourne city. Love Real Estates use Individual branding strategy in branding their products. This is because each product is unique, the apartments are built with distinguished designs and specification, although all might be residential houses but each house has little relationship or similarity to the other (Love Real Estate 2010 a). The houses have their own independent locations and hence its marketing can take its own direction. The Love Real Estate agents as mentioned above offers both residential and commercial properties. The properties are independently sold; the house along 3/1 Chappell Street, Thomastown for instance (Love Real Estate 2010 a). This is a two bedroom house that is elegantly built and boasts of its latest architectural designs. The house has an open floor plan, a specious kitchen and with expertly positioned bedroom with built in robes. The structure also has a low maintenance living coupled with a private courtyard and a secure lock up garage. In addition, the house has polished floor boards, instantaneous hot water system, porcelain tiling, stainless steel appliances, split system cooling and ducted heating (Love Real Estate 2010 a). This property is targeted for the older working class that has strong aspiration for owning a home. The product is in its maturity phase and hence it is bound to fetch the highest price on the market. Price This is the amount of money the customer pays for the product. Product pricing is extremely important as it is the one that determines whether the company will make profit or incur losses. Adjusting of prices has immense impact on the marketing strategy of a given company (Richard, 2004). When coming up with a price for a specific product, the company must be cautious and aware of the customer perceived value for the product (Jain, Haley, Voola & Wickham, 2012). The established price points for similar products must also be considered. Consequently, when setting up product price, it is important to determine whether the customers are price sensitive. Some of the pricing strategies that marketers use are market skimming, market penetration, and natural pricing. These strategies either can be company profit maximization inclined or product quality centred. Love Real Estate Agents use product quality or value based pricing strategy. For instance, the price of their apartments/homes is strictly aligned to the value of the product. Their houses are built using state of the architectural designs (Pike, 2011). The modern building technologies are also incorporated; in this regard the valued modern house requirements are met in order to satisfy the customer wants. The value that the product has to the customer is highly considered as compared the cost of production or any other factor. The customer perceived value is highly regarded in this pricing strategy (Pike, 2011). In accordance with Love Real Estate Agents, the target market perceived value of housing services is the fundamental factor considered particularly during product pricing process. Promotion This refers to all means and methods of communication that a company uses to provide information to their targeted market segments about the product they are selling (Cravens & Piercy, 2009). To provide information to he targeted market segments, the marketers use different communication media. Promotion is an extremely important process that any selling company must undertake; it is through promotion that products or services are made known to the customers. Without promotion the company’s fabulous products and services cannot attract the interest of the preoccupied and on-the-move customers. Marketing communication is the most significant and essential element of promotion (Cravens & Piercy, 2009). Effective marketing wholly relies on effective communication which primarily comes from the art of effective promotion. Promotion can be informing, persuading or reminding customers about the product or the service the company is offering. Informing in this regard involves all the communication activities that the marketers do to make the existence of a product or service known to the customers (Walker, Gountas, Mavondo & Mullins, 2009). Persuading on the other hand, is the use of different communication techniques in order to win the customer to buy the products that are already known to them (Pike, 2011). Reminding; this is the process of consistently informing customers that a particular product or service is still available and they can still make a purchase (Brochick & Cooper, 2008). Promotion is done through advertising, public relations, direct sales, personal selling, and sales promotion. Love Real Estate agents combine all marketing promotional tools to achieve the best marketing potentials. For instance, the company uses different media to advertise their products; full page printout in local newspapers, magazines, articles, the television and radio advertisements. The company also has put up billboards across the city and along major roads and highways in Melbourne city to inform their potential customers of the availability different residential houses. The company also uses direct marketing; the company also has a website with an automated houses catalogue that enables customers to search for apartments of their choice. Customers can also directly and interactively communicate with marketers online to specify their house requirements. Personal selling is another method that the company has employed to ensure they acquire new customers and make sales. In this regard, the residential homes are open for inspection and viewing by customers on specific days where the marketing personnel directly interact with customers in person. Place This refers to providing the product or a service to consumers’ convenience; for instance the accessibility to the product or service. Marketers use various strategies like selective distribution, intensive distribution, exclusive distribution and/or franchising in order to complement other aspects of marketing mix (Cravens & Piercy, 2009). Intensive distribution in this regard, is commonly used to distribute low price commodities that encourage impulse purchases (Brochick & Cooper, 2008). Exclusive distribution; this strategy is used to for highly priced products and in some instances it requires the intermediary to give much details in its sell. And lastly, the selective distribution is mainly used for products that are only found in chosen outlets. The products commonly distributed using this strategy are; household appliances, televisions, and computers (Walker, Gountas, Mavondo & Mullins, 2009). Love Real Estate Agents use exclusive distribution for their products; details about their products are provided. The location of the house, the size, the number of bedrooms, the kitchen lay out, the type of finish, and other property characteristics are provided. The company products are also strategically located, for example; residential houses in Thornbury are located in an environment that meets the aspirations of the older working class and retired seniors (Love Real Estate 2010b). These houses are near to other social amenities and security is highly regarded. The location also provides a sense of community to the customers; there are schools, colleges and universities to encourage quality education for the children of the residents (Love Real Estate 2010b). The accessibility to town is good, and thus the working community can easily access the city. The transport services are superbly provided for. Recommendations Love Real Estates Agents form the above discussion offer stand alone residential apartments. The trends in the housing industry are changing, and real estate companies are building concentrated apartments. These apartments have similar characteristics and hence their marketing strategy is the same; The Company should adopt this new trend to cut on operational costs and increase their profitability. Love Real Estates Agents should expand their area of operation and enter into new markets outside Melbourne City in order to widen their market capture. The company uses value based marketing strategy as discussed above, in order to expand their customer base it should also use other strategies like skimming and market penetration pricing strategies in order to win more customers and beat their competitors. The Love Real Estate Agents should also employ the use of Integrated Marketing Communication strategy in marketing their products. These will help them to understand the customer needs and ultimately work to satisfy them. Bibliography Bronchick W. and Cooper, R. 2008, How to sell a house fast in a slow real estate market: A 30 day plan. New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons Cravens, D. W., and Piercy, N. F. 2009. Strategic marketing (9th ed). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill/Irwin. Donnelly, J. H., and Peter, J. P. 2009. Marketing Management: Knowledge and skills (9thed). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill/Irwin. Jain SC, Haley GT, Voola R. and Wickham M. (2012) 'Marketing: Planning and Strategy - 1st Asia-Pacific Edition', Cengage Learning, Melbourne, Australia Love Real Estate 2010.a. 3/1 Chappell Street, Thomastown. Retrieved on 15/5/2013; from, http://www.loverealestate.com.au/Buying/Search/Detail.aspx?id=THOM410&wlid=b3cdc78a-cbb2-422c-9a22-bc67935245ca Love Real Estate 2010 b. Real Estate Reservoir. Retrieved on 15/5/2013, from; http://www.loverealestate.com.au/Reservoir Love Real Estate 2010c. Real Estate Thornbury. Retrieved on 15/5/2013, from; http://www.loverealestate.com.au/Thornbury Love Real Estate 2010d. Your Northern Melbourne Real Estate Solutions. Retrieved on 15/5/2013, from; http://www.loverealestate.com.au/ Pike, A. 2011. Brands and Branding Geographies. London: Edward Elgar Publishing Richard, G. D. 2004, Real Estate Rainmaker: Guide to Online marketing. New York: John wiley & Sons Roose D. 2007. Commercial Real Estate Investing: A creative guide to successfully making money. Melbourne: John Wiley & Sons Walker, O. C., Gountas, J. I., Mavondo, F. T., & Mullins, J. W. 2009. Marketing strategy: A decision-focused approach. North Ryde, N.S.W.: McGraw-Hill. Read More