Donna DeNicola recently managed to purchase a Portland, Oregon, home that received four offers by tacking an unusual inducement onto hers: free pizza for life.
That’s one of a number of ways that pizza has helped buyers, sellers and real estate agents get what they’re after. Here are three use cases for pizza in real estate.
1. Sweeten an offer
Buyers can get a leg up on the competition in inventory-starved housing markets by slipping incentives into their offer.
DeNicola, the owner of a pizzeria, offered $26,000 above the home’s asking price, plus two months’ free rent to the sellers, KPTV reported. Her offer of a free pizza every month was the icing on the cake.
If the sellers take full advantage of the pizza inducement for 40 years, they’ll get 480 pizzas valued at $10,000, KPTV said.
2. Make a listing delicious
In a market with plenty of homes to choose from, sellers may have more use for pizza than buyers.
Two years ago, Doug Miller offered a free pizza to anyone who would buy a listing that had idled on the market for six months in Lancaster Township, Pennsylvania, WGAL reported.
Inman wasn’t immediately able to find out whether the marketing ploy paid off, but we do know that it won the listing quite a bit of publicity.
3. Be an ambassador of yumminess
Tyler Smith
Tyler Smith, CEO of transaction management platform SkySlope, used pizza to burnish his brand.
Smith, who was a top-producing real estate agent before founding SkySlope, regularly bought pies from a local restaurant in exchange for exposure on pizza boxes.
Smith explained the marketing technique in a recent blog post:
- I would purchase a pizza from him for every property I closed. That’s 230 pies a year.
- When I bought a pizza, he had to match me by contributing one free of charge.
- With each pizza I purchased, and he subsequently gave away, it had to include my branding on the packaging — essentially a giant sticker of my face on the box.
- Lastly, attached to each one of the boxes I would have a sheet of personally branded pizza coupons that included the free pizza for which Mr. Giovanni was responsible.