Builder uses holiday-shopping tactics to land homebuyers
Think Black Friday and its spinoffs ("Small Business Saturday," "Cyber Monday") are about retailing and not homebuying? Here's a builder that's applying the doorbuster concept to a product with actual doors.
Dominion Homes is running a Cyber Monday promotion that promises "drastic discounts" of up to $80,000 on a dozen homes. The properties aren't local -- they're in Ohio and Kentucky -- so the odds are slim that you'd be interested in joining the buying pool. But I wonder what you think of the idea.
Does a holiday-deal approach aimed at homebuyers appeal to you or turn you off?
The Thanksgiving through New Year's stretch is typically a doldrums period for the housing market, the exact opposite of what happens to retailers.
On that note: If you end up out in the Black Friday scrum, you can make me a happy camper by shooting me an email about what you're seeing. Busy or not? Worth it or meh? I'm writing our story about the annual post-Thanksgiving (and this year, during-Thanksgiving) shopping craziness, and I can't be everywhere. Email: jhopkins(at)baltsun.com.
Thanks, all. And happy Thanksgiving!
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Comments
Well, it's unique, I'll give it that...
Posted by: Mike Calo | November 24, 2011 10:30 AM
This article can be misleading. One might think it's referring to the dominion group based here in Baltimore. This is a different company altogether it seems.
Posted by: Johny | November 30, 2011 1:08 AM
Sorry, Johny, I didn't think of the Baltimore-based Dominion Group when I was writing this -- they're not a homebuilder in the traditional sense of "subdivide land, build homes from scratch," since they're acquiring homes and rehabbing them. (Had the company's name been, say, Ryland, which used to be headquartered here and still builds a lot of homes here, I definitely would have specified in the first reference rather than waiting for the next sentence to explain where the homes are.)
Posted by: Jamie Smith Hopkins | November 30, 2011 6:16 AM
A good deal is a good deal, whether it comes on Cyber Monday or not. Definitely an innovative way to bring in potential buyers — especially at a time when people are very much in bargain mode. I'm curious to know how this panned out. Perhaps in these times, marketing homes with the types of sales promotions more commonly associated with other types of goods is a smart idea. And perhaps this is a sign of things to come?
Posted by: Mark Swift | December 8, 2011 4:45 PM