We’ve all paged through those free real estate magazines at the beach, lusting after waterfront homes. Well, they are the heart of design/builder Michael Pagnotta’s marketing campaign on Long Beach Island, a barrier island off the coast of New Jersey.
Trained as a design/builder from his first day out of architecture school, Pagnotta encountered a tough problem when he started his own business in the depths of the recession seven years ago. “I couldn’t ride the coattails of anyone,” he explains. Architects wouldn’t refer clients because he competed with them for design jobs, and builders wouldn’t recommend him for design work because they were afraid of losing the construction contract. He was on his own, and he needed an edge.
So he took a look around his island and found a niche. Many of the island’s original summer cottages were built with no insulation and poor foundations and occupied small lots within the flood plain. Pagnotta designed a series of home plans that made good use of the small sites, and he speced them with low-maintenance, low-cost materials. Next he designed several advertisements for those real estate magazines, promoting his tear-down designs as “affordable quality on Long Beach island.” “We’re catching the upwardly mobile customer with those ads,” he says.
Pagnotta estimates he spends about $35,000 a year on marketing. His second largest supply of leads comes from his big display ads in the Yellow Pages; he runs one under “architect” and one under “builder.” And his new six-month-old Web site (http://www.pagnotta.com) has already sold three houses for him. “The customers said that if we had an Internet site, we must be ‘with it,’” he recalls. And indeed he is.
