Residential developers use Facebook, YouTube--and even Twitter -- to market projects

Lisa Van de Ven, National Post

Tridel, for one, is doing it.

Follow the developer on Twitter and you'll find out about new prices and sales milestones, and be linked to suite floor plans. Or if you'd rather, join their group on Facebook, become a friend or just a fan and get your information that way.

It may not be the most traditional method of marketing a condominium development, but Toronto developers are searching for new ways to get their projects noticed and to further focus their marketing campaigns. In doing so, some are going online -- to Facebook, YouTube and even Twitter.

"I'm not even so sure we call this unconventional any more," says Jim Ritchie, senior vice-president of sales and marketing with Tridel. "It's certainly part of the mindset of a large group of consumers in today's marketplace, which I think has now been coined as the 'Net generation.' And this is something that just comes naturally to them."

If you ask Mr. Ritchie, tools like Twitter and Facebook are useful avenues for developers looking to get word out about their new or ongoing projects, even if they do reach only a small percentage of the marketplace that way. And while only a few Toronto developers may use these online forums right now, he also thinks it's something that will get bigger with time. "It's very new, and it's a very small segment of the marketplace that we're dealing with, but I believe it's something that will grow," Mr. Ritchie says.

He isn't the only one who thinks so. On YouTube, developer Menkes shows off footage of the construction milestones at its much talked about Four Seasons Private Residences Toronto project, co-developed with Lifetime Urban Development and Halcyon Ventures. Some of the same footage is available on the project's website, but if you ask Menkes's vice-president of marketing, Mimi Ng, YouTube is another place to show off and market the development. And for her, it was a natural fit.

"We started to realize that if you went on YouTube and you typed in our project name, there were already other people posting up little films or little pieces of footage that they had taken of the site under construction," Ms. Ng says. "Seeing that people were interested -- naturally interested -- we decided to post our own videos there as well."

Is that exposure on YouTube helping? Ms. Ng says it's too soon to tell but, like Mr. Ritchie, she believes there's potential for new exposure in these kinds of online avenues. And for a project like the Four Seasons -- which is attracting international buyers -- YouTube also helps provide a visual connection to out-of-town purchasers who can't visit the property. "For people who are out of town to be able to see the site progress -- the construction progress --online is a huge benefit," she says.

The question is, how can developers best maximize the potential of online avenues? Mazyar Mortazavi, principal of TAS DesignBuild -- a progressive developer which in the past has embraced online tools, such as blogging on the company's M5V Condominiums website -- wonders exactly that. Mr. Mortazavi and his team have investigated forums like Facebook and Twitter for their marketing potential, but have so far refrained from getting in on the action, instead choosing to take their time to try to determine the best approach.

"To us, all of these new social online tools become means of being able to provide more information, more content, to better communicate with the consumers," says Mr. Mortazavi. "We are definitely looking at the technologies and looking at the opportunities, and seeing what they mean to our industry."

After all, while online avenues like Facebook and Twitter offer an immediacy that lets developers share information almost as soon as it happens, that immediacy can come with its own pitfalls. "You get someone who's had a bad day and something happened in their condo, then they're going to let it all out -- take it out on the developer, and all of a sudden the developer's the big, bad jerk that caused all the problems in the world," Mr. Mortazavi says.

Still, that doesn't mean he doesn't see the potential. As more people turn to online mediums for information, the question will be how -- not if -- Toronto developers find a way to join the fray.

"For us, it's really a matter of looking and testing things, where we can begin to get a sense as to what people want to know," says Mr. Mortazavi. "We're doing surveys and piecing together information as to how best we can use these tools to inform the consumer."