If you are a homebuilder, builder/developer, developer, or lender fending off commercial foreclosures, you are about to read some incredibly good news.

Hilton Head Developer David Brown says it is better than good. "It is the most effective sales program I have ever seen."

Brown needed to sell his five models.

He hired an internet marketing company to help him, then challenged them to design a program around a ‘call to action."

The company, SaleAMP, suggested the developer give new home buyers what resale real estate thrives on: the opportunity to make an offer- but to do it quietly, fast and with internet marketing thrust at full throttle.

Here are the rules set by SaleAmp. They care, because they get paid profits for performance, a novelty in itself.

• Establish a thirty-day offer window

• Limit inventory

• Keep it publicly quiet to the local market to protect the perception of a distress sell

• Do not use traditional media or an auction house

• No MLS

• No absolute pricing

• No buyer’s premium

• No heavy marketing costs, and no intense management

• Employ every internet marketing tool available

• Implement at supersonic speed

Hello, "stealth" auction.

"Within 30 days, we had 22 offers, sold the five models, plus two more homes. We had visitors from New York and California who flew in just to see what we were selling. It was unbelievable," Brown said.

The results: Brown is opening a second development within a few weeks, something he said he would have never done, if the program had not worked so well.

Amy Garcia, marketing director for The Reserve At Lake Travis in Austin, Texas, and The Boardwalk at St. Charles Bay, Texas, agrees with Brown. She credits SaleAMP's real estate internet marketing prospect capture and delivery systems with a forty percent increase in sales of lots and cottages.

"If we get the right offers, we accept the offers. If the offers come in too low we call the buyers, explain that the offers for the properties were too low, and encourage them to raise their bid. If they choose not to, we offer them lower priced lots. We keep two or three units in the offer inventory all the time. It costs us nothing, is totally flexible, easy to control, and requires no management." Garcia says.

Internet auctions for real estate are nothing new, of course. What seems to be driving sales while protecting property pricing integrity and brand is the stealth approach to online auctions.

This approach gives developers with distressed or pending foreclosure inventory a fast, low cost way to test the market and generate sales without publicly conceding or implying desperation. In less than two months developers could have enough sales to support a request for a forbearance agreement. Lender with foreclosed assets may also move in this direction as a fast way to determine pricing and disposition alternatives. Traditional auction houses already have internet auction capability. So do major real estate franchises. It would be reasonable to assume that online real estate auctions will continue to grow and to become fairly common place in the days ahead.

But Paul Kirchoff, SaleAMP’s Founder and CEO, a former Dell Computer marketing guru, says that the key to any marketing program, whether it be an auction or not, is not the program or event. It is the traffic driven to it.

"It is exciting to design innovative programs like the stealth auction that work, for sure, but the real key, assuming the product is saleable and priced right, is getting traffic to the event. Without it, your auction landing page is nothing but another billboard on a back road to nowhere," Kirchoff said.

For sure, SaleAMP is not the only internet marketing service out there.

The following key word Google searches were conducted on October 31, 2009. The results were surprising.

Online real estate auction – 42,800,000 pages Online shopping center auction – 5,930,000 pages Orlando shopping center auction – 170,000 pages

The bottom line is that there are now real auction choices developers and lenders. They can conduct traditional, online or a combination of both.

Brown believes the stealth auction, or as he calls it, the ‘best offer bid’ will be the dominant new homes marketing strategy in 2010 and beyond.

He could be right or he could already be losing ground to yet unknown technology now being designed somewhere. Who knows?

There is one thing for sure: 85 percent of all homebuyers shop on the internet.

Few people know they are even looking. Many have not contacted a real estate agent and don’t plan to.

Stealth sellers seem to be doing more than just drawing traffic. They are selling homes. End of story.

Published: November 25, 2009

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David Fletcher has been a Florida real estate condominium and new homes broker for 30 years with more than $3 billion in new construction sales. In 2008, Keller Williams Realty International named him a "Lifetime Achiever." Along the way he has chaired the Florida Homebuilders Associaiton Sales and Marketing Council, trained thousands of general agents and on-site agents to work together, and was a featured speaker at the National Association of Realtors. Recently he founded New Homes Niche, a builder-certified co-broker training system "to meet the growing trend we see in short sale buyers moving to new homes for a lot of reasons." Call David at 407 234 2349, , and visit his website.