FRONT LINES: Fast Takes

Spotlight on homes

Parade,the ubiquitous newspaper insert, delivered a story about our hot national housing market in a special report in August called “Where America Lives.” Relying extensively on NAR materials, the report looked at buying and selling today, homebuyer preferences, buying fixer-uppers, and what your money buys in different markets. Findings from the annual Cost vs. Value Report that REALTOR® Magazine produces jointly with Remodeling magazine formed the basis of a look at renovation pay-offs. Parade appears every Sunday in about 340 newspapers across the country, reaching 75 million readers, the publication says.

Your house, brought to you by . . . Considering brand extensions such as Jeeps sporting Levi interiors, can we expect branded real estate? Maybe. Already available: a house with John Deere landscaping or, if you’re looking for a rustic feel, an Orvis log cabin. Households buying in Trenton, a Durham, N.C., new-home community, receive complimentary John Deere lawn care equipment to maintain John Deere–designed landscaping. Orvis, the outdoor gear retailer, bills cabin designs it’s branding for Rocky Mountain Log Homes as possibly the “biggest gear storage system ever offered by a fly fishing company.” The success of these kinds of brand extensions is mixed. Ford Motor Co. hit pay dirt with its Ford Explorer Eddie Bauer Edition. In contrast, “Clorox spent $60 million trying to move into detergent. But it had trouble getting people to think of it as anything but a maker of bleach,” says Don Hobbs, chairman of Hobbs/Herder Advertising.

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of scenery. As cities grow, views shrink. That’s prompting cities to implement view protection ordinances. In California, Burbank is considering regulating the height of homes and fences in some hillside neighborhoods, and Westlake Village has passed an ordinance letting residents sue their neighbors when views are threatened. Seattle has put view protection on the front burner. And New York City is establishing “view corridors,” designated areas that maintain unimpeded visual lines to city landmarks, to help compensate residents for lost views.

$32,000. The REALTOR® brand generates an average of $32,000 in incremental income to each REALTOR® over the life of membership in NAR, a brand valuation study finds. The study, commissioned by NAR, calculates the marketplace advantage of the REALTOR® brand above and beyond other NAR membership benefits.

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Where America Lives
REALTOR® Brand Worth $32,000 to Every Member