Luxe living in Charlotte

Robert Dulin knows a thing or two about real estate. He’s been in the industry since 1985, buying and selling homes with a focus on Myers Park and other in-town neighborhoods like Dilworth and SouthPark.

A top producer in his Keller Williams Realty SouthPark office, Dulin just completed more course work in luxury home marketing with the Institute for Luxury Home Marketing, one of only about a dozen in the Charlotte area to have done so.

So why, when he’s been selling and buying high-end properties for years, was this training important?

“The most successful people in the business spend the most time training,” he explains.

Despite his experience, he said the two-day course was an “eye opener.”

“It’s changed my thinking on people of means,” Dulin said, then peppered his remarks with a number of facts he took away from the course.

Most high-end property owners and prospective buyers gained their wealth the old-fashioned way – they earned it themselves. The median income of people with means is $151,000. They scrimp and save 20 percent of their income and can indeed retire at age 50.

“The wealthy are, above all, frugal,” said Dulin. “Their No. 1 place to shop is Costco.”

There are plenty of high-end buyers and sellers in Charlotte, Dulin said, they’re just not flashy.

“You don’t have to drive a Mercedes Benz and wear a $2,000 suit” to be affluent, he said. Discretion and privacy are also common attributes of millionaires, a group that is normally comprised of men in their 50s who are still married to the same woman, he added.

The definition of a luxury home varies from place to place, but it is generally a property that is within the top five percent to ten percent of the given real estate market. In his monthly Myers Park real estate blog, Dulin draws the line at homes that sold for $1 million or more “because it turns heads,” though he admits that $1 million doesn’t get you what it did 20 years ago.

So how do the services provided to this exclusive group differ from those offered to other consumers?

These consumers want an agent who is authentic, has integrity, is confident and knows the market, according to Dulin. But what differentiates the affluent from other buyers and sellers is that they are extremely private and very busy.

“They want someone to take everything off their shoulders,” said Dulin, and they shy away from an agent who is going to gossip about the client back at the office.

Dulin said that for high-end properties he may pull out all the stops and get aerial photography or advertise in slick publications and international luxury websites, marketing efforts he most likely wouldn’t consider for most $200,000 homes.

The Institute for Luxury Home Marketing began offering its certification program in 2003 and has trained more than 8,000 real estate professionals, including about a dozen here in Charlotte.

As an independent organization, the institute is not affiliated with any firm and is open to all luxury home and estate agents. On its website, the firm says it offers luxury home marketing training, resources in the high-end market and tools to help its members become more successful.

Laurie Moore-Moore, the CEO of the institute, founded it in 2003 right as the high-end market exploded with the booming economy creating wealth and demand for luxury property.

Luxury buyers are not your conventional buyers.

“They’re buying lifestyle,” said Moore-Moore, and are not limited by what they can afford. Increasingly, she says, affluent buyers are using luxury property as “a portfolio play: Since the downturn, worldwide luxury residences are a bigger portion of people’s investment portfolios.”

With high-end buyers and sellers come higher expectations. These people are already used to dealing with customer service providers that cater to their needs, so agents are held to a higher standard.

“They’re measured against a personal shopper at Neiman’s or the experience of a Crystal Cruise,” explained Moore-Moore. “They’re extremely demanding and expect the best” from their agent.

Moore-Moore said the institute not only teaches real estate professionals to identify these affluent people, but how to make clients of them. Some agents, she said, fall into the trap of believing that appealing to wealthy consumers means living the same lifestyle, but she said what customers with means are really looking for is competency.