The luxury of time

She went on to explain that the sheer amount of time that goes into creating the wallpaper is a huge part of what defines it as luxury. From the client's brief, to the inspiration from the room itself, to hand drawing the designs, to the printing (by hand) of each and every roll of wallpaper, what sets her product apart from non-luxury competing companies was the sheer effort that goes into the finished product. 

Its true, pretty well, everywhere: 'hand crafted', 'tailor made', 'bespoke' etc. are all words that mean luxury because they are the antithesis of so much of todays mass produced, disposable, fast fashion and A.I. created services and products.

Apply the logic to cars, clothing, food, art, and it holds up. I believe it is Bentley cars where the chief engineer actually signs the engine, putting their name to the end product like an artist would a painting, emphasising the (literally) personal touch and accountability, in a world where they compete with factory lines of robots assembling cars 24/7.

Sure, in some circumstances there is a (often smaller) premium paid for speed (usually around delivery times), but in the overwhelming sense: fast = cheap. Bit controversial perhaps, but forget the theory for now, lets apply it to agency. 

Two agents value a property: 

Agent A tells the vendor if they instruct them, they can 'get it on Rightmove' today. 

Agent B tells the vendor they have a carefully constructed property launch strategy: staging & styling their home, high end photography with eye-catching twilights, a luxury car to sweep up the driveway on the presenter lead video, a pre-launch teaser and marketing build up to create demand, access to their database of high net worth buyers to generate initial interest, before a timed launch across all platforms leading to perhaps an Open Day to stimulate buyer competition and bidding wars, and so on and so forth... all while their sole point of contact, the agent they met initially, consistently guiding them through from that first meeting at MA to completion. 

Obviously, one agent is in a much more commanding position to charge a 'proper' fee - in fairness, because they are doing a significantly more thorough job. The vendors thought process for agent A might be 'how difficult can this be if you can 'do it' in an afternoon'. 

In fact, a By Design agent I was speaking to the other week insists that for their vendor communication NOTHING is automated, because it detracts from the highly personalised nature of their service. Fair play!

But, much like the wallpaper company who tell you about the hand-crafted nature of their product, and the man hours that go into it and the bespoke nature of their designs BEFORE you can start buying them, the real value for Agent B and their comprehensive strategy comes in how they tell (or, sell!) this effort to their client. 

At By Design we have our own property launch methodology, under the acronym P.L.E.A.S.E.D. so we can tell vendors this is the plan. (In fact, the dictionary definition of By Design is 'according to plan'... thats how important it is to us!). 

As always, if you're interested in the value of the luxury property market in your area, I'm happy to run a bespoke, time consuming, painstaking, requiring hundreds of man-hours market report for you... just let me know.

David Lindley.