Sotheby’s International Real Estate has opened a “real estate lifestyle experience store” in San Francisco’s ritzy Cow Hollow District, where there will be no tacky information about listings displayed in the window.
Instead, agents Butch Haze and Rick Teed envision a “”curated community center of sorts, where potential buyers will stop by for espresso and just happen to run into Realtors, interior decorators and architects,” the San Francisco Chronicle’s Nellie Bowles reports.
The tech boom “means there are a lot more people with cash on hand,” and the agent’s job is not to push to make sales happen but “to host the party,” Bowles says. Though there are no prices on the walls,”there will always be Champagne.”
So is the goal for the office to sell real estate “subliminally,” as the Chronicle’s headline suggests?
The strategy is a little more concrete: Invite local notables (Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick) “to host discussions and cocktail parties with themes not necessarily related to buying a house” and sell “neighborhoods partly by the celebrities who live in them.” Source: sfgate.com
