The following story was written by Stewart Lytle and appeared on the front page of the Home Center section of The Dallas Morning News on Sunday, April 29:
When Mary Poss listed a $4.3 million home in Preston Hollow for sale recently, she knew she wanted to advertise it on the Luxury Portfolio International web site.
Limited to homes priced at more than $750,000, the high-end real estate web site markets more than 25,000 properties a year around the world. This site translates the home advertisements into nine languages, in more than 200 countries and in more than 60 different currencies.
So Poss was not entirely surprised when she got calls about the house from a potential buyer in India, but she also heard from buyers in Paris, France and Paris, Texas.
I thought that was pretty funny, she says. But not unusual.
The Ebby Halliday Realtor, who was the president pro tem of the Dallas City Council, says, Every single day someone from around the world is moving to Dallas.
A big reason, she thinks, is Ebby Halliday Realtors’ affiliation with Luxury Portfolio International. The site was created in 2005 by the Leading Real Estate companies of the World, which Ebby Halliday helped start 48 years ago.
It is targeted at the affluent homebuyer. According to an independent research firm, the typical visitor to LuxuryPortfolio.com has a household income of $1.32 million, owns a primary home valued at more than $3.8 million and a secondary home valued at more than $5 million.
Luxury Portfolio has established itself as the go-to website for today s affluent consumers, delivering the industry s most comprehensive online information on luxury homes, markets and trends and representing quality companies, agents and service in markets worldwide, says Paul Boomsma, president of Luxury Portfolio International.
In addition to bringing the affluent buyer, Luxury Portfolio’s reporting system allows brokers to share with their sellers not just how much traffic each house receives, but where the prospective buyers live and what language they viewed the site in.
Ebby Realtor Heidi Loewinsohn attributed a recent sale to the network because of the data she could give her client.
Loewinsohn was working with a corporate CEO to sell his 5,000-square-foot house in Flower Mound.
Because it was listed with Luxury Portfolio, the CEO could see who was looking on the web at his $845,000 house sitting on 4 acres near the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport. Almost 20 percent of the interested home lookers were from the Washington, D.C., area. Another 11 percent were from San Francisco, CA, the web site told him.
That information was very helpful to him. We were able to target some additional advertising in those markets, she said.
The home was sold in a matter of weeks to a Major League Baseball player.
The site is also useful for out-of-town buyers, who have no clue what Realtor could help them buy a new home in an unfamiliar city.
We are known for the best locally branded companies in the world, and we maintain that reputation by holding our firms to a higher standard of quality and service, Boomsma says.
Stephanie Pfeffer, the network’s executive vice president, put it more succinctly. We are the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.
