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One man's real-estate vision quest, and
the $15 billion portfolio he's building
along the way
As a child in Israel, Michael Shvo created an unusual tribute to themetropolis he and his parents had lef t behind. Along the baseboard of hisbedroom, in the small beach town of Arsuf, Shvo pasted a cut paper silhouetteof the New York skyline, with its arching bridges and iconic towers.
Twenty-eight years later, Shvo is poised to bring that childhood fixation tolife, by literally transforming the sk yline of Long Island City-the tatty industrialsection of Queens, just across the East River from Manhattan-into the city hehad built in his mind.
It won't be easy. Years of nightmarish political wheeling and dealing area given. And it's certain to raise hackles, if only for the sheer hubris of Shvo'svision. But the 34-year-old real-estate marketing wunderkind has been girdingfor this challenge his entire life. "In 10 years, I want to say we're responsible forthis skyline," he says. "We're in the greatest city in the world, and there's still anopportunity to put your signature there."
No one ever accused Michael Shvo of thinking small. And with a distinctsoftening in the property market, even in New York, the odds that his ambitionwill derail are not inconsiderable. But Shvo's strategy-to turn each building hemarkets into a luxury brand of its own-is calculated to insulate his developersfrom such turbulence. His basic contention is that real estate should be marketedin the mode of Car tier, Gucci, or Rolex: massive market research; devotionto demographic and psychographic analysis; ex treme attention to customerexperience and service; integrated marketing across every touch point, everyfunction, every channel.
That's not news in the consumer-products realm, but it represents freshthinking in an industry that, until recently, worried less about seducing customersthan about simply feeding their insatiable demand.
"The real-estate industry is accustomed to being very conservative," saysAnna Klingmann, author of the upcoming Brandscapes: Architecture in theExperience Economy (MIT Press, fall 2007). "They have, by and large, relied on tried-and-true formulas." In the urban condo market, that meant selling basedon location, square footage, and predictable amenities (" Working fireplace!Park view!"). But as consumers have become more design sav v y, demand hasescalated for more upscale, sophisticated dwellings that serve, essentially, as a residential shor thand for a buyer's style, aesthetic, and weltanschauung.
And that niche is where Shvo sees his opening. If the product is ex traordinary, he says, it's insulated from the dreaded competition that invariably af flicts commodit y proper ties when the market softens. He raises a bottle of branded Shvo water-Shvo2O-to make his case."If you're buying this water from me for $1, and somebody else says she'll sell it to you for 99 cents, you're in a race to the lowest price," he says. "But if I bring you a bottle of water from the Holy Land, you'll pay $2 for it because you can't get it anywhere else."
把每棟建筑都变成一个奢侈品牌, 是Michael Shvo——这个房地产营销行业颠覆者的工作、目标和梦想。Shvo 认为, 房地产的营销也可以采用像卡地亚(Cartier)、古奇和劳力士这样的奢侈品牌一样的营销方式: 广泛的市场调查;人口统计分析和心理分析; 关注消费者体验和服务; 和顾客每个接触点的整合营销等等。这种营销方式对于大众消费品来说早已屡见不鲜, 但在房地产领域确实是一种创新。现在的消费者更加注重设计, 他们会将建筑和自己的风格、美感甚至是世界观联系起来, 过去那种仅仅依赖位置、面积等干巴巴销售要素已经不能满足这种需求了。
He's cock y, and he's blunt-t wo Myers-Briggs characteristics required to compete for Gotham real-estate moguldom. Inde ed, it's tempting to write of f Shvo as yet another ego in a business that's saturated with themtempting, that is, until the sheer scale of his operation sinks in. In New York alone, through the end of 2007, he's handling 6,335 residential units in 30 buildings (including 9 in Long Island City) that are collectively worth about $7 billion. And he's primed to ex tend the reach of his eponymous company to Washington, DC; Texas; Florida; Singapore; Mexico; and the UK. By 2008, he expects to have $8 billion in proper t y under development outside New York, putting his total marketing and sales por tfolio in the neighborhood of $15 billion. Nice neighborhood, especially for a business founded in 2004.
So, can Shvo outsmart a teetering market? Nationally, the median price of a previously owned home fell 3.5% in October, to $221,000, according to the National Association of Realtors; by November, it had dropped fur ther, to $218,000, down from $225,000 a year before. Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Economy.com, predicted that housing prices would continue to sink in 2007, marking the "first [annual] decline
in national housing prices since the Great Depression."
The condo market in many cities is already in fre e fall. In Boston, for example, the asking prices for a Philippe Starck-branded project were lowered by an average of 12%. Some developers, meanwhile, have opted preemptively to conver t their buildings into rental units (seven apartments in a serpentine Manhattan tower by starchitect Charles Gwathmey are now rentals), hotels (the old Tommy Hilfiger headquarters in New York were to become a Peter Som-designed building but ended up being sold off to Hyatt), or offices. And across the countr y, some high-end developments have been abandoned outright, from Miami (15 developments representing 1,900 units) to Bethesda (a planned $1 billion Canyon Ranch Living mixed-use complex) to Las Vegas (Aqua Blue, an 825-unit, $600 million condohotel resor t with Michael Jordan as an investor).
True , Manhattan condos are insulated to some degree by factors unique to that market, including the record bonuses on Wall Street, the influx of foreign buyers drawn by a weak dollar, and the relatively low incidence of speculation. But despite the rampant, hopeful talk among brokers of a "soft landing," the market is still a pale imitation of its robust 2005. Traders on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, which recently began trading futures and options contracts on housing prices in 10 U.S. markets, including
New York, are predicting declines in all 10 over the nex t 12 months, with the composite index predicted to fall 6.8%. In November, the inventor y of unsold Manhattan condos was up 70% from the previous year.
Butacoolbreezeismererefreshment to Shvo. If he can continue to come up with "irreplaceable properties," he says, the buyers will be there. And if the competition to create the next buzzworthy project in New York is heating up, the rest of the countr y remains a blank canvas, just waiting for him to arrive with his real-estate Shock and Awe road show.
Astheamenitiesarmsracekeepsexpanding,the points of differentiation increasingly move into the psychographic space. You are where you live. " We've moved beyond the cachet of a neighborhood to the cachet of a building," says Klingmann. Marketers now strive to aggregate like-minded buyers under a single ro of-ver tical villages of simpatico souls.
像奢侈品學习营销的创新目前看来行之有效, 经Shvo 营销的项目达到了30 栋建筑, 包括6000 余个单元, 价值70 亿美元。很快到2008 年, 他的业务将扩展到新加坡、墨西哥和英国, 那时他营销的项目价值总额将达到150 亿美元。
但是, 美国市场正在经历下滑, 自有房屋的平均价格下降了3.5%,Moody 经济网的首席经济学家Mark Zandi 预测2007 年房屋价格还会下降。
不过这难不住Shvo, 如果他能持续找到每个项目的独特卖点。随着业务的逐步扩大, 房地产的差异化已经转移到了精神层面。你在哪里住, 代表了你是什么样的人。“我们从关注邻居的声望开始变成关注建筑的声望。”营销专业人士Klingmann 说。
"It's all about that fe eling that you're not just buying an apartment, but
joining this superexclusive club," says Lockhar t Steele, publisher of the realestate
obsessives' Web site Curbed..com. "Where Shvo is for real is that he caught on to that before most people and was able to break away and infuse his projects-even if from a literal design standpoint they didn't deser ve it-with this kind of rock-star ethos, just by being associated with them."
That's why, in Shvo's book, selling amenities is so 2005. "People want to feel they own something that has a personalit y and a stor y," he says. And that means more than just the usual appliance upgrades, or adding a health club. " What are you going to say, 'I bought in the SubZero building' or 'the granite-countertop building'?" he snif fs. "People are looking for self-definition. They're looking to belong."
THE IMAGINEER
"I have this aversion to kitchens."Resplendent in one of his many $5,000 Brioni suits and a $170 pink silk basket weave HermËs tie, his wav y hair slicked back like Tom Hanks' in The Da Vinci Code, Shvo has stepped into highintensity broker mode in the sales office of a 1920s neoclassical building called 20 Pine. Nex t to him stands a wall of cabinetr y that, but for a slender faucet and discreet Miele cooktop, could be a high-end entertainment unit. No sign of a fridge. No inkling of a dishwasher. Not a telltale knob or handle or dial mars the surface of the rift-cut white oak.
Despite the camouflage, this is, indeed, a kitchen, albeit one unlikely ever to see a toaster oven, let alone a box of Annie's mac-and-cheese bunnies. "The target clients in this building are mostly singles and young couples-alpha malesnot people who co ok," he says, with some distaste. "So I didn't want to see any appliances. It took me six months to try and put an oven behind the cabinet because of code. But it was worth it, because a kitchen's not a very pretty thing."
Martha acoly tes might argue that point. Armani fans, probably not so much.And that's what Shvo is counting on: a healthy pool of style-dependent, restauranthopping young buyers willing to pony up between $680,000 and $4.5 million for a minimalist condo in a building dressed by Armani/Casa, the home-furnishings arm of the fashion empire.
The building is, to date, the most fully realized example of Shvo's strategic vision. Indeed, the sales office at 20 Pine makes the Prada store in Soho look a little sketchy.The cavernous 8,000-square-foot space is furnished like a massive living room, with cozy conversation areas and seductive lighting. Receptionists, armored in Armani, sit before a towering 28-foot-high bookcase crammed with an impossible number of oversized ar t books. Nooks along the perimeter allow potential buyers to view floorplans on plasma screens and get real-time sales information. In an adjoining room, a small replica of the Armani catwalk in Milan bisects a space where video loops detail the neighborhood, the health club, and the concierge service. A life-size model of a kitchen and the bathroom, which features an exotic dark stone-galaxy schist from India-complete the presentation.
According to luxur y-marketing exper t Michael J. Silverstein, author of Trading Up: Why Consumers Want New Luxury Goods . . . and How Companies Create Them, Shvo is a "segmentation guy." His technique is to perform a demographic presort of the market, then develop product strategically marketed to particular niches. "He's like the guy in the bar who can throw three bull's-eyes at the dar tboard." Trump, on the other hand, has one shtick. "For every one he appeals to," Silverstein says, "there's one he doesn't. With a microsegmentation strategy, if you're certain the applicable universe is big enough, you have a winning formula."
Shvo 能讓客户感觉到他不仅仅是在买一个公寓, 而是在加入一个独一无二的俱乐部。尽管有时这种描绘有些夸张, 但Shvo 确实能用这种摇滚歌星般的精神力量带动客户。
这也是为什么Shvo 在他的书中写道: 人们喜欢他们所拥有的物品带有个性和故事, 想想看, 人们会说“这是我在SubZero 建筑买的”, 还是会说“这是在花岗岩贴面的楼里买的”? 人们总是在寻找自我定义和归属感。
Shvo 最知名的一个手笔就是这个叫20 Pine 的项目, 在这里,Shvo 把橱具和冰箱等都隐藏在壁橱的后面, 因为他看到很多潜在客户都是不怎么走进厨房的年轻夫妇和单身汉。尽管也有人质疑在买房子时还在追寻时尚的人到底有多少, 但是看看Shvo 在20 Pine 设立的样板间就知道他的底气了。
这个有8000 平方英尺大的房间被装饰得像个巨大的起居室, 惬意的谈话角落、诱惑的灯光、高达20 英尺的书架、穿着阿玛尼服装的前台接待人员、电视屏幕还播放着整个社区的规划、健康俱乐部以及所提供的服务——这一切足以让Prada 的专卖店黯然失色。
The formula-well understo od by commercial-real-estate consultants who know to site Prada on Rodeo and its more youthful spin-of f, Miu Miu, on Melrose-is simple: the right brand, the right location, and the right product for the right customer. ("That's the magic," Shvo says. "It's what we get paid millions to do.") The fact that it has been applied so rarely to urban residential proper t y probably has less to do with unevolved thinking than with a long bo om that made sophisticated marketing irrelevant. But now, in tighter times, it's becoming table stakes for high-end condos.
And it's trickierthanitlooks .Gwathmey's Astor Place project, for example, while architecturally stunning,was a bad fit for the boho neighborhood in which it was sited. "I love the East V illage," says Curbed's Ste ele, "but if I had $10 million to spend, I'm not sure I'd want to be stepping outside to skateboarders every morning." Similarly, the ultra-high-end conversion of the Stanhope Hotel on Fif th Avenue landed with a thud when buyers balked at paying upward of $10.5 million for condos with dÈclassÈ 9-foot ceilings.
Misfire on one component of the algorithm, in other words, and your next building may be fronted with golden arches.
"The precision required for luxur y pricing is more significant than in recent memor y," says Jonathan Miller, CEO of appraisal firm Miller Samuel. So, as Manhattan condo inventories build, Shvo must prove that his microsegmentation instincts are the best in town. Even with a staff cherry-picked from the world's top luxury marketers-Calvin Klein, Brioni, Dolce & Gabbana-that's a daunting challenge.
"The firstquestionisabout authenticity," says Patrick Hanlon, author of Primalbranding. "Can he get the icons right? The appliances in the kitchen, the fixtures in the bath. Then, can he be sure he's appealing to a psychographic that actually exists?" More important, can he continue to dif ferentiate his proper ties in a market that is increasingly aping his approach? On New York's Upper East Side, for example, Miraval Living, an of fsho ot of the Miraval Resor t in Tucson, Arizona, is developing a luxur y proper t y designed for folks whose dream is to live at the spa, with hot-andcold running yogis. Downtown, club and hotel maestro AndrÈ Balazs has created the William Beaver House, an NC-17- rated condo building targeting the randysingles market (the private screening ro om is furnished with daybeds). On Central Park West, architect Rober t A.M. Stern is putting finishing touches on an ultraluxe property that features a David Spon-designed wine cellar with an octagonal tasting room (hedge-fund manager Daniel Loeb paid $45 million for the penthouse; Denzel Washington, Sting, and one of the Google guys will be neighbors). In other words, the relentless flood of new fangled amenities (Covered outdo or dog parks! Climbing walls! Murphy of fices!) are cries for attention in an ADD market. "If you don't do that now," Miller says, "you can't keep up."
拿波士頓咨询公司的顾问、奢侈品营销专家Michael J.Silverstein 的话说,Shvo 是个市场细分的专家, 他先对市场进行人口统计学方面的调研, 然后策略性地开发产品并向特定的市场销售。
如何精准定价是Shvo 面临的一个难题, 此外,Shvo 还要证明他对市场的划分是最正确的。要知道, 连CK、D&G 这样的顶级品牌都认为如何对市场进行细分是一大挑战。
也有专家担心,Shvo 如何能确定那些他要去满足的客户的精神需求真的存在, 更重要的是他如何持续不断地将自己的建筑在市场上差异化。因为流行在时时变化, 人们对建筑的需要也在不断发展和变化。
REAL-ESTATE ASSASSIN
The child of t wo Israeli organic-chemistr y professors, Shvo first came to the United States when he was 6 and his father had a short teaching gig at Yale. His most vivid memor y of that period, besides the Manhattan sk yline, was a seminal performance of Peter Pan on Broadway.
After a stint in the Israeli army, and a program in finance at Bar Ilan University, he set up his own brokerage firm, specializing in trading gas and oil stocks. He made a fortune, he lost a fortune ("I learned how to deal with greed and loss," he says), then woke up one day in 1995 and decided he'd outgrown his little country. He sold his stake in the business to his partner and flew to New York with $3,000.
On the ride into Manhattan from the airport, he asked his cab driver how the ta xi business worked. Within three months, he had used his money to lease medallions and was running a fleet of 10 cabs and 30 drivers off a street corner in Spanish Harlem, where he was sleeping on a friend's floor. He plowed every dollar back into the business. At one point, he miscalculated and ended up not eating for three days. "I was too embarrassed to call my parents," he says.
After a brief period during which he managed a bar and got married (a relationship that has since ended in divorce), he interviewed for a job renting apar tments. He was an instant success. He'd work 18 hours, showing as many as 40 low-end places a day. He loved the immediacy of the return on his sweat equity. "You could come to work, find somebody an apartment, and get paid three days later. It was totally dependent on how hard you wanted to work."
When his company was bought out by Douglas Elliman, he brought his hard-charging style to posher precincts, eventually forming a group of brokers within the company who reported to him-and gave him a hefty cut of their commissions. The Shvo Group was a Dar winian crucible: Some people thrived, others were crushed. "He treated his employees like s--t," says one. "We worked like dogs. Crazy hours. There were a lot of people crying." His peers maintained that Shvo's rabid style and tactics were anathema even in a sanguinar y business. "He drove me crazy," Paul Purcell, Elliman's former president, told New York Magazine. "If you gave an inch, he wanted a yard. There's a psychology behind this, almost a psychosis."
"Real-estate brokerage is an 'eat what you kill' kind of business," Shvo says now, without remorse. "If you're good, you can make a lot of money. But 10% of the brokers do 90% of the deals." He has nothing but contempt for people who approach the profession at less than full throttle: "Do it right, or don't do it at all. There are enough people out there who can do a half-assed job."
That attitude earned him a reputation as "the assassin of Manhattan real estate," a ruthless shark, an unstoppable force of nature, and "master of the f--king universe." It also won him an ethics complaint. In spring 2004, a grievance was filed against him with the Real Estate Board of New York after he met with a developer who had an exclusive agreement with another broker-taboo in the industr y. He was forced to take a 90-minute ethics class as penance. (The developer smoothed things over by presenting Shvo with a $30,000 A. Lange & S– hne watch for his birthday.)
Adam Tihany, the restaurant and hotel designer, thinks his friend Shvo's youth and success fuel the professional enmity. "Real estate is a very important and ex tremely lucrative business," he says. "In New York, where you don't have that much land and opportunity to develop, it breeds env y. Who can sell more, whose building is bigger, who has more gold intheir teeth. That Michael's young and successful and good-looking makes the older ones yellow."
Plus, even in a cit y accustomed to Trumpian intemperance, Shvo set a new bar. "The allure of the bad boy is part of what's in play here," Steele says.
Shvo 出生在以色列, 父母都是有機化学的教授, 在为以色列军队服役期满后, 在Bar Ilan 大学参加了一个短期的金融课程, 在那之后,Shvo 做起了倒卖石油和燃气股票的生意,1995 年,Shvo 来到了纽约。
在从机场去往市区的路上,Shvo 就和出租车司机聊起了出租车的生意, 三个月内,Shvo 已经运营起了拥有10 辆出租车和30 个司机的出租车公司。
在结束了不太成功的出租车生意之后,Shvo 还开过酒吧并经历过一次婚姻, 最后,Shvo 发现他对房屋出租情有独钟, 他可以一天工作18 个小时, 向客户展示多达40 处的房屋。但是Shvo 对工作的狂热让他的某些同事怨声载道, 甚至有人抱怨Shvo 像对待狗那样对待他们。
但Shvo 对此不以为然, 他说房地产经纪人本来就是弱肉强食, 90% 的业务是被10% 的经纪人拿到的。由此,Shvo 也得到了“曼哈顿房地产界刺客”的称号。
"Every community needs its outrageous characters." If a week goes by without a Shvo item on Curbed, Steele says, "an email will come in with the subject header 'Michael Shvo,' and it will either be a random rant or a demand for more coverage."
In October 2004, Shvo lef t Elliman under circumstances that are still cloudy. Some sources claim he was fired. Shvo says there was a more compelling rationale: "I made the most amount of money that anybody had ever made in a year, so there was nowhere to go. If you're a shrink, you would probably say that once I get to where I want to go, I want to move on to something more interesting."
That something, he says, began taking shape one day in 2004 when he walked into the new Time Warner building at the southwest corner of Central Park. The structure was being touted as the ne plus ultra of New York real estate, but Shvo found the actual sales experience to be decidedly mundane. There was a little of fice with a scale model, renderings on the wall, a short video. "I said to myself, 'This is outrageous. They're really getting away with murder.' And a switch went on in my head," he recalls. "I knew there was a better way. And I decided, no more talk, it's time for action."
When he lef t Elliman, he took 27 members of his group with him. The Shvo Group has since dwindled to 12 as the marketing organization takes preeminence (the vestiges of the group act as a conventional brokerage while Shvo Marketing both promotes and sells all the new developments). The company now occupies t wo floors in a Tihanydesigned office on Fifth Avenue-directly across from Trump-with zebrawo od paneling and a Rody Grauman lighting fixture called "85 Bulbs." ("It's in MOMA.")
One key hire was Marci Sutin Levin, a ringer for the character Edna "E" Mode in The Incredibles, who had run marketing operations for Brioni and the Italian coffee company Lavazza. She originated the marketing campaign for 20 Pine, creating a 112-page, four-color magazine-st yle brochure, baited with libidinous and underdressed models-the better to lure those Wall Street alpha males.
"We were selling the entire Armani experience," she says, "like stepping into the brand. From the moment you walked in there, you were disconnected from the street. It's a bit like Vegas."
To maintain the illusion, Shvo signed up the tony concierge firm Quintessentially (famous for rounding up a flock of albino peacocks for JLo's wedding), to provide ser vices for residents, including a free breakfast for anyone living above the 25th floor. He and Levin conceived the idea of keeping the sales office open 24 hours a day for time-strapped investmentbanker types, a stunt that drew attention from CNN, ABC, the BBC, and Dutch, Japanese, and Korean television. The opening night par t y featured R&B star John Legend. There's a golf simulator and a Turkish bath in the basement.
Buyers were impressed. "I looked at 25 or 30 properties over a three-month period," says Edward Sander, who runs marketing for SAP. "No other property had a showroom that allowed you to have the emotional experience of what living in the building would be like." Within two days of opening, 30% of the building was sold, not bad for a project just blocks from ground zero. Currently, 75% of the condos are under agreement-all, says Shvo, at asking price.
"At the end of the day, what we do translates into real dollars," he says. "At 20 Pine we're 30% above any other building in the neighborhood. And we're $100 million over the estimate of what the project would bring when we started."
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LANLANGUAGE TIPS
Amenity 令人愉快的事物 Silhouette 剪影, 側影
Weltanschauung 世界观 Assassin 刺客
Enmity 仇恨, 愤怒 Authenticity 本真
Allure 诱惑, 吸引力 Schist 页岩
2004 年的一天,Shvo 路过纽约中央公园的新时代华纳大厦时发现, 本来处于很好地理位置的项目的销售情况却不尽如人意。于是Shvo 决定创立自己的房地产经纪公司。
开办新公司的时候,Shvo 从原来的公司带走了27 个人, 后来有12 个人留了下来, 现在Shvo 的公司在第五大道由著名建筑师Tihany 设计的写字楼里拥有两层办公室,Shvo 的成功就是来自他对待房地产项目的做法: 不仅仅是销售, 更要营销。
Shvo 将曾经在著名服装品牌Brioni 负责市场营销的MarciSutin Levin 招至麾下, 后者采用时尚性感的模特参与公司的市场活动, 并仿照时装行业制作了厚厚的彩色宣传册来吸引男性买家。“我们销售的是阿玛尼般的体验。” Marci 说。
客户似乎也感觉到了, SAP 负责营销的Edward 说:“我看了二三十个项目了, 只有Shvo 的项目有样板间, 让我能体验到居住在这个建筑中是什么感觉。”这个新项目还没有出地面就已经售出了30%。
栏目编辑： 马飞 mafei@cbnet.com.cn
the $15 billion portfolio he's building
along the way
As a child in Israel, Michael Shvo created an unusual tribute to themetropolis he and his parents had lef t behind. Along the baseboard of hisbedroom, in the small beach town of Arsuf, Shvo pasted a cut paper silhouetteof the New York skyline, with its arching bridges and iconic towers.
Twenty-eight years later, Shvo is poised to bring that childhood fixation tolife, by literally transforming the sk yline of Long Island City-the tatty industrialsection of Queens, just across the East River from Manhattan-into the city hehad built in his mind.
It won't be easy. Years of nightmarish political wheeling and dealing area given. And it's certain to raise hackles, if only for the sheer hubris of Shvo'svision. But the 34-year-old real-estate marketing wunderkind has been girdingfor this challenge his entire life. "In 10 years, I want to say we're responsible forthis skyline," he says. "We're in the greatest city in the world, and there's still anopportunity to put your signature there."
No one ever accused Michael Shvo of thinking small. And with a distinctsoftening in the property market, even in New York, the odds that his ambitionwill derail are not inconsiderable. But Shvo's strategy-to turn each building hemarkets into a luxury brand of its own-is calculated to insulate his developersfrom such turbulence. His basic contention is that real estate should be marketedin the mode of Car tier, Gucci, or Rolex: massive market research; devotionto demographic and psychographic analysis; ex treme attention to customerexperience and service; integrated marketing across every touch point, everyfunction, every channel.
That's not news in the consumer-products realm, but it represents freshthinking in an industry that, until recently, worried less about seducing customersthan about simply feeding their insatiable demand.
"The real-estate industry is accustomed to being very conservative," saysAnna Klingmann, author of the upcoming Brandscapes: Architecture in theExperience Economy (MIT Press, fall 2007). "They have, by and large, relied on tried-and-true formulas." In the urban condo market, that meant selling basedon location, square footage, and predictable amenities (" Working fireplace!Park view!"). But as consumers have become more design sav v y, demand hasescalated for more upscale, sophisticated dwellings that serve, essentially, as a residential shor thand for a buyer's style, aesthetic, and weltanschauung.
And that niche is where Shvo sees his opening. If the product is ex traordinary, he says, it's insulated from the dreaded competition that invariably af flicts commodit y proper ties when the market softens. He raises a bottle of branded Shvo water-Shvo2O-to make his case."If you're buying this water from me for $1, and somebody else says she'll sell it to you for 99 cents, you're in a race to the lowest price," he says. "But if I bring you a bottle of water from the Holy Land, you'll pay $2 for it because you can't get it anywhere else."
把每棟建筑都变成一个奢侈品牌, 是Michael Shvo——这个房地产营销行业颠覆者的工作、目标和梦想。Shvo 认为, 房地产的营销也可以采用像卡地亚(Cartier)、古奇和劳力士这样的奢侈品牌一样的营销方式: 广泛的市场调查;人口统计分析和心理分析; 关注消费者体验和服务; 和顾客每个接触点的整合营销等等。这种营销方式对于大众消费品来说早已屡见不鲜, 但在房地产领域确实是一种创新。现在的消费者更加注重设计, 他们会将建筑和自己的风格、美感甚至是世界观联系起来, 过去那种仅仅依赖位置、面积等干巴巴销售要素已经不能满足这种需求了。
He's cock y, and he's blunt-t wo Myers-Briggs characteristics required to compete for Gotham real-estate moguldom. Inde ed, it's tempting to write of f Shvo as yet another ego in a business that's saturated with themtempting, that is, until the sheer scale of his operation sinks in. In New York alone, through the end of 2007, he's handling 6,335 residential units in 30 buildings (including 9 in Long Island City) that are collectively worth about $7 billion. And he's primed to ex tend the reach of his eponymous company to Washington, DC; Texas; Florida; Singapore; Mexico; and the UK. By 2008, he expects to have $8 billion in proper t y under development outside New York, putting his total marketing and sales por tfolio in the neighborhood of $15 billion. Nice neighborhood, especially for a business founded in 2004.
So, can Shvo outsmart a teetering market? Nationally, the median price of a previously owned home fell 3.5% in October, to $221,000, according to the National Association of Realtors; by November, it had dropped fur ther, to $218,000, down from $225,000 a year before. Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Economy.com, predicted that housing prices would continue to sink in 2007, marking the "first [annual] decline
in national housing prices since the Great Depression."
The condo market in many cities is already in fre e fall. In Boston, for example, the asking prices for a Philippe Starck-branded project were lowered by an average of 12%. Some developers, meanwhile, have opted preemptively to conver t their buildings into rental units (seven apartments in a serpentine Manhattan tower by starchitect Charles Gwathmey are now rentals), hotels (the old Tommy Hilfiger headquarters in New York were to become a Peter Som-designed building but ended up being sold off to Hyatt), or offices. And across the countr y, some high-end developments have been abandoned outright, from Miami (15 developments representing 1,900 units) to Bethesda (a planned $1 billion Canyon Ranch Living mixed-use complex) to Las Vegas (Aqua Blue, an 825-unit, $600 million condohotel resor t with Michael Jordan as an investor).
True , Manhattan condos are insulated to some degree by factors unique to that market, including the record bonuses on Wall Street, the influx of foreign buyers drawn by a weak dollar, and the relatively low incidence of speculation. But despite the rampant, hopeful talk among brokers of a "soft landing," the market is still a pale imitation of its robust 2005. Traders on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, which recently began trading futures and options contracts on housing prices in 10 U.S. markets, including
New York, are predicting declines in all 10 over the nex t 12 months, with the composite index predicted to fall 6.8%. In November, the inventor y of unsold Manhattan condos was up 70% from the previous year.
Butacoolbreezeismererefreshment to Shvo. If he can continue to come up with "irreplaceable properties," he says, the buyers will be there. And if the competition to create the next buzzworthy project in New York is heating up, the rest of the countr y remains a blank canvas, just waiting for him to arrive with his real-estate Shock and Awe road show.
Astheamenitiesarmsracekeepsexpanding,the points of differentiation increasingly move into the psychographic space. You are where you live. " We've moved beyond the cachet of a neighborhood to the cachet of a building," says Klingmann. Marketers now strive to aggregate like-minded buyers under a single ro of-ver tical villages of simpatico souls.
像奢侈品學习营销的创新目前看来行之有效, 经Shvo 营销的项目达到了30 栋建筑, 包括6000 余个单元, 价值70 亿美元。很快到2008 年, 他的业务将扩展到新加坡、墨西哥和英国, 那时他营销的项目价值总额将达到150 亿美元。
但是, 美国市场正在经历下滑, 自有房屋的平均价格下降了3.5%,Moody 经济网的首席经济学家Mark Zandi 预测2007 年房屋价格还会下降。
不过这难不住Shvo, 如果他能持续找到每个项目的独特卖点。随着业务的逐步扩大, 房地产的差异化已经转移到了精神层面。你在哪里住, 代表了你是什么样的人。“我们从关注邻居的声望开始变成关注建筑的声望。”营销专业人士Klingmann 说。
"It's all about that fe eling that you're not just buying an apartment, but
joining this superexclusive club," says Lockhar t Steele, publisher of the realestate
obsessives' Web site Curbed..com. "Where Shvo is for real is that he caught on to that before most people and was able to break away and infuse his projects-even if from a literal design standpoint they didn't deser ve it-with this kind of rock-star ethos, just by being associated with them."
That's why, in Shvo's book, selling amenities is so 2005. "People want to feel they own something that has a personalit y and a stor y," he says. And that means more than just the usual appliance upgrades, or adding a health club. " What are you going to say, 'I bought in the SubZero building' or 'the granite-countertop building'?" he snif fs. "People are looking for self-definition. They're looking to belong."
THE IMAGINEER
"I have this aversion to kitchens."Resplendent in one of his many $5,000 Brioni suits and a $170 pink silk basket weave HermËs tie, his wav y hair slicked back like Tom Hanks' in The Da Vinci Code, Shvo has stepped into highintensity broker mode in the sales office of a 1920s neoclassical building called 20 Pine. Nex t to him stands a wall of cabinetr y that, but for a slender faucet and discreet Miele cooktop, could be a high-end entertainment unit. No sign of a fridge. No inkling of a dishwasher. Not a telltale knob or handle or dial mars the surface of the rift-cut white oak.
Despite the camouflage, this is, indeed, a kitchen, albeit one unlikely ever to see a toaster oven, let alone a box of Annie's mac-and-cheese bunnies. "The target clients in this building are mostly singles and young couples-alpha malesnot people who co ok," he says, with some distaste. "So I didn't want to see any appliances. It took me six months to try and put an oven behind the cabinet because of code. But it was worth it, because a kitchen's not a very pretty thing."
Martha acoly tes might argue that point. Armani fans, probably not so much.And that's what Shvo is counting on: a healthy pool of style-dependent, restauranthopping young buyers willing to pony up between $680,000 and $4.5 million for a minimalist condo in a building dressed by Armani/Casa, the home-furnishings arm of the fashion empire.
The building is, to date, the most fully realized example of Shvo's strategic vision. Indeed, the sales office at 20 Pine makes the Prada store in Soho look a little sketchy.The cavernous 8,000-square-foot space is furnished like a massive living room, with cozy conversation areas and seductive lighting. Receptionists, armored in Armani, sit before a towering 28-foot-high bookcase crammed with an impossible number of oversized ar t books. Nooks along the perimeter allow potential buyers to view floorplans on plasma screens and get real-time sales information. In an adjoining room, a small replica of the Armani catwalk in Milan bisects a space where video loops detail the neighborhood, the health club, and the concierge service. A life-size model of a kitchen and the bathroom, which features an exotic dark stone-galaxy schist from India-complete the presentation.
According to luxur y-marketing exper t Michael J. Silverstein, author of Trading Up: Why Consumers Want New Luxury Goods . . . and How Companies Create Them, Shvo is a "segmentation guy." His technique is to perform a demographic presort of the market, then develop product strategically marketed to particular niches. "He's like the guy in the bar who can throw three bull's-eyes at the dar tboard." Trump, on the other hand, has one shtick. "For every one he appeals to," Silverstein says, "there's one he doesn't. With a microsegmentation strategy, if you're certain the applicable universe is big enough, you have a winning formula."
Shvo 能讓客户感觉到他不仅仅是在买一个公寓, 而是在加入一个独一无二的俱乐部。尽管有时这种描绘有些夸张, 但Shvo 确实能用这种摇滚歌星般的精神力量带动客户。
这也是为什么Shvo 在他的书中写道: 人们喜欢他们所拥有的物品带有个性和故事, 想想看, 人们会说“这是我在SubZero 建筑买的”, 还是会说“这是在花岗岩贴面的楼里买的”? 人们总是在寻找自我定义和归属感。
Shvo 最知名的一个手笔就是这个叫20 Pine 的项目, 在这里,Shvo 把橱具和冰箱等都隐藏在壁橱的后面, 因为他看到很多潜在客户都是不怎么走进厨房的年轻夫妇和单身汉。尽管也有人质疑在买房子时还在追寻时尚的人到底有多少, 但是看看Shvo 在20 Pine 设立的样板间就知道他的底气了。
这个有8000 平方英尺大的房间被装饰得像个巨大的起居室, 惬意的谈话角落、诱惑的灯光、高达20 英尺的书架、穿着阿玛尼服装的前台接待人员、电视屏幕还播放着整个社区的规划、健康俱乐部以及所提供的服务——这一切足以让Prada 的专卖店黯然失色。
The formula-well understo od by commercial-real-estate consultants who know to site Prada on Rodeo and its more youthful spin-of f, Miu Miu, on Melrose-is simple: the right brand, the right location, and the right product for the right customer. ("That's the magic," Shvo says. "It's what we get paid millions to do.") The fact that it has been applied so rarely to urban residential proper t y probably has less to do with unevolved thinking than with a long bo om that made sophisticated marketing irrelevant. But now, in tighter times, it's becoming table stakes for high-end condos.
And it's trickierthanitlooks .Gwathmey's Astor Place project, for example, while architecturally stunning,was a bad fit for the boho neighborhood in which it was sited. "I love the East V illage," says Curbed's Ste ele, "but if I had $10 million to spend, I'm not sure I'd want to be stepping outside to skateboarders every morning." Similarly, the ultra-high-end conversion of the Stanhope Hotel on Fif th Avenue landed with a thud when buyers balked at paying upward of $10.5 million for condos with dÈclassÈ 9-foot ceilings.
Misfire on one component of the algorithm, in other words, and your next building may be fronted with golden arches.
"The precision required for luxur y pricing is more significant than in recent memor y," says Jonathan Miller, CEO of appraisal firm Miller Samuel. So, as Manhattan condo inventories build, Shvo must prove that his microsegmentation instincts are the best in town. Even with a staff cherry-picked from the world's top luxury marketers-Calvin Klein, Brioni, Dolce & Gabbana-that's a daunting challenge.
"The firstquestionisabout authenticity," says Patrick Hanlon, author of Primalbranding. "Can he get the icons right? The appliances in the kitchen, the fixtures in the bath. Then, can he be sure he's appealing to a psychographic that actually exists?" More important, can he continue to dif ferentiate his proper ties in a market that is increasingly aping his approach? On New York's Upper East Side, for example, Miraval Living, an of fsho ot of the Miraval Resor t in Tucson, Arizona, is developing a luxur y proper t y designed for folks whose dream is to live at the spa, with hot-andcold running yogis. Downtown, club and hotel maestro AndrÈ Balazs has created the William Beaver House, an NC-17- rated condo building targeting the randysingles market (the private screening ro om is furnished with daybeds). On Central Park West, architect Rober t A.M. Stern is putting finishing touches on an ultraluxe property that features a David Spon-designed wine cellar with an octagonal tasting room (hedge-fund manager Daniel Loeb paid $45 million for the penthouse; Denzel Washington, Sting, and one of the Google guys will be neighbors). In other words, the relentless flood of new fangled amenities (Covered outdo or dog parks! Climbing walls! Murphy of fices!) are cries for attention in an ADD market. "If you don't do that now," Miller says, "you can't keep up."
拿波士頓咨询公司的顾问、奢侈品营销专家Michael J.Silverstein 的话说,Shvo 是个市场细分的专家, 他先对市场进行人口统计学方面的调研, 然后策略性地开发产品并向特定的市场销售。
如何精准定价是Shvo 面临的一个难题, 此外,Shvo 还要证明他对市场的划分是最正确的。要知道, 连CK、D&G 这样的顶级品牌都认为如何对市场进行细分是一大挑战。
也有专家担心,Shvo 如何能确定那些他要去满足的客户的精神需求真的存在, 更重要的是他如何持续不断地将自己的建筑在市场上差异化。因为流行在时时变化, 人们对建筑的需要也在不断发展和变化。
REAL-ESTATE ASSASSIN
The child of t wo Israeli organic-chemistr y professors, Shvo first came to the United States when he was 6 and his father had a short teaching gig at Yale. His most vivid memor y of that period, besides the Manhattan sk yline, was a seminal performance of Peter Pan on Broadway.
After a stint in the Israeli army, and a program in finance at Bar Ilan University, he set up his own brokerage firm, specializing in trading gas and oil stocks. He made a fortune, he lost a fortune ("I learned how to deal with greed and loss," he says), then woke up one day in 1995 and decided he'd outgrown his little country. He sold his stake in the business to his partner and flew to New York with $3,000.
On the ride into Manhattan from the airport, he asked his cab driver how the ta xi business worked. Within three months, he had used his money to lease medallions and was running a fleet of 10 cabs and 30 drivers off a street corner in Spanish Harlem, where he was sleeping on a friend's floor. He plowed every dollar back into the business. At one point, he miscalculated and ended up not eating for three days. "I was too embarrassed to call my parents," he says.
After a brief period during which he managed a bar and got married (a relationship that has since ended in divorce), he interviewed for a job renting apar tments. He was an instant success. He'd work 18 hours, showing as many as 40 low-end places a day. He loved the immediacy of the return on his sweat equity. "You could come to work, find somebody an apartment, and get paid three days later. It was totally dependent on how hard you wanted to work."
When his company was bought out by Douglas Elliman, he brought his hard-charging style to posher precincts, eventually forming a group of brokers within the company who reported to him-and gave him a hefty cut of their commissions. The Shvo Group was a Dar winian crucible: Some people thrived, others were crushed. "He treated his employees like s--t," says one. "We worked like dogs. Crazy hours. There were a lot of people crying." His peers maintained that Shvo's rabid style and tactics were anathema even in a sanguinar y business. "He drove me crazy," Paul Purcell, Elliman's former president, told New York Magazine. "If you gave an inch, he wanted a yard. There's a psychology behind this, almost a psychosis."
"Real-estate brokerage is an 'eat what you kill' kind of business," Shvo says now, without remorse. "If you're good, you can make a lot of money. But 10% of the brokers do 90% of the deals." He has nothing but contempt for people who approach the profession at less than full throttle: "Do it right, or don't do it at all. There are enough people out there who can do a half-assed job."
That attitude earned him a reputation as "the assassin of Manhattan real estate," a ruthless shark, an unstoppable force of nature, and "master of the f--king universe." It also won him an ethics complaint. In spring 2004, a grievance was filed against him with the Real Estate Board of New York after he met with a developer who had an exclusive agreement with another broker-taboo in the industr y. He was forced to take a 90-minute ethics class as penance. (The developer smoothed things over by presenting Shvo with a $30,000 A. Lange & S– hne watch for his birthday.)
Adam Tihany, the restaurant and hotel designer, thinks his friend Shvo's youth and success fuel the professional enmity. "Real estate is a very important and ex tremely lucrative business," he says. "In New York, where you don't have that much land and opportunity to develop, it breeds env y. Who can sell more, whose building is bigger, who has more gold intheir teeth. That Michael's young and successful and good-looking makes the older ones yellow."
Plus, even in a cit y accustomed to Trumpian intemperance, Shvo set a new bar. "The allure of the bad boy is part of what's in play here," Steele says.
Shvo 出生在以色列, 父母都是有機化学的教授, 在为以色列军队服役期满后, 在Bar Ilan 大学参加了一个短期的金融课程, 在那之后,Shvo 做起了倒卖石油和燃气股票的生意,1995 年,Shvo 来到了纽约。
在从机场去往市区的路上,Shvo 就和出租车司机聊起了出租车的生意, 三个月内,Shvo 已经运营起了拥有10 辆出租车和30 个司机的出租车公司。
在结束了不太成功的出租车生意之后,Shvo 还开过酒吧并经历过一次婚姻, 最后,Shvo 发现他对房屋出租情有独钟, 他可以一天工作18 个小时, 向客户展示多达40 处的房屋。但是Shvo 对工作的狂热让他的某些同事怨声载道, 甚至有人抱怨Shvo 像对待狗那样对待他们。
但Shvo 对此不以为然, 他说房地产经纪人本来就是弱肉强食, 90% 的业务是被10% 的经纪人拿到的。由此,Shvo 也得到了“曼哈顿房地产界刺客”的称号。
"Every community needs its outrageous characters." If a week goes by without a Shvo item on Curbed, Steele says, "an email will come in with the subject header 'Michael Shvo,' and it will either be a random rant or a demand for more coverage."
In October 2004, Shvo lef t Elliman under circumstances that are still cloudy. Some sources claim he was fired. Shvo says there was a more compelling rationale: "I made the most amount of money that anybody had ever made in a year, so there was nowhere to go. If you're a shrink, you would probably say that once I get to where I want to go, I want to move on to something more interesting."
That something, he says, began taking shape one day in 2004 when he walked into the new Time Warner building at the southwest corner of Central Park. The structure was being touted as the ne plus ultra of New York real estate, but Shvo found the actual sales experience to be decidedly mundane. There was a little of fice with a scale model, renderings on the wall, a short video. "I said to myself, 'This is outrageous. They're really getting away with murder.' And a switch went on in my head," he recalls. "I knew there was a better way. And I decided, no more talk, it's time for action."
When he lef t Elliman, he took 27 members of his group with him. The Shvo Group has since dwindled to 12 as the marketing organization takes preeminence (the vestiges of the group act as a conventional brokerage while Shvo Marketing both promotes and sells all the new developments). The company now occupies t wo floors in a Tihanydesigned office on Fifth Avenue-directly across from Trump-with zebrawo od paneling and a Rody Grauman lighting fixture called "85 Bulbs." ("It's in MOMA.")
One key hire was Marci Sutin Levin, a ringer for the character Edna "E" Mode in The Incredibles, who had run marketing operations for Brioni and the Italian coffee company Lavazza. She originated the marketing campaign for 20 Pine, creating a 112-page, four-color magazine-st yle brochure, baited with libidinous and underdressed models-the better to lure those Wall Street alpha males.
"We were selling the entire Armani experience," she says, "like stepping into the brand. From the moment you walked in there, you were disconnected from the street. It's a bit like Vegas."
To maintain the illusion, Shvo signed up the tony concierge firm Quintessentially (famous for rounding up a flock of albino peacocks for JLo's wedding), to provide ser vices for residents, including a free breakfast for anyone living above the 25th floor. He and Levin conceived the idea of keeping the sales office open 24 hours a day for time-strapped investmentbanker types, a stunt that drew attention from CNN, ABC, the BBC, and Dutch, Japanese, and Korean television. The opening night par t y featured R&B star John Legend. There's a golf simulator and a Turkish bath in the basement.
Buyers were impressed. "I looked at 25 or 30 properties over a three-month period," says Edward Sander, who runs marketing for SAP. "No other property had a showroom that allowed you to have the emotional experience of what living in the building would be like." Within two days of opening, 30% of the building was sold, not bad for a project just blocks from ground zero. Currently, 75% of the condos are under agreement-all, says Shvo, at asking price.
"At the end of the day, what we do translates into real dollars," he says. "At 20 Pine we're 30% above any other building in the neighborhood. And we're $100 million over the estimate of what the project would bring when we started."
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P U B L I S H E D I N FA S T C O M PA N Y M A G A Z I N E .
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LANLANGUAGE TIPS
Amenity 令人愉快的事物 Silhouette 剪影, 側影
Weltanschauung 世界观 Assassin 刺客
Enmity 仇恨, 愤怒 Authenticity 本真
Allure 诱惑, 吸引力 Schist 页岩
2004 年的一天,Shvo 路过纽约中央公园的新时代华纳大厦时发现, 本来处于很好地理位置的项目的销售情况却不尽如人意。于是Shvo 决定创立自己的房地产经纪公司。
开办新公司的时候,Shvo 从原来的公司带走了27 个人, 后来有12 个人留了下来, 现在Shvo 的公司在第五大道由著名建筑师Tihany 设计的写字楼里拥有两层办公室,Shvo 的成功就是来自他对待房地产项目的做法: 不仅仅是销售, 更要营销。
Shvo 将曾经在著名服装品牌Brioni 负责市场营销的MarciSutin Levin 招至麾下, 后者采用时尚性感的模特参与公司的市场活动, 并仿照时装行业制作了厚厚的彩色宣传册来吸引男性买家。“我们销售的是阿玛尼般的体验。” Marci 说。
客户似乎也感觉到了, SAP 负责营销的Edward 说:“我看了二三十个项目了, 只有Shvo 的项目有样板间, 让我能体验到居住在这个建筑中是什么感觉。”这个新项目还没有出地面就已经售出了30%。
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