A Melbourne-based developer has racked up over $12 million in apartment sales in just 15 minutes after using an online platform known as Investorist.
The new Blackburn Boutique Apartments at East End in Blackburn South situated near Monash and Deakin universities in Melbourne were snapped up within minutes without the developers having resort to traditional real estate marketing campaigns.
Investorist founder and former Mirvac marketing manager Jon Ellis who developed the platform in 2013 said: “Investorist regularly runs launch events such as this for our clients.”
“We are delighted that all apartments were reserved in just a few minutes by the Investorist network partners attending. The fact the end purchasers are likely to be owner-occupiers, rather than foreign investors, is unique not only to the area but to B2B property selling in Australia.”
“Perhaps most important element in the success of the East End launch was the hand-picked selection of agents we work with regularly, whom we know have an interest in this type of boutique property”, said Ellis in a statement.
JLL Residential Projects director Anthony Ferraro, the master agent of the project, was thrilled with the outcome received from using the Investorist platform.
“We also targeted more the owner than investor market, given East End’s larger sizes internally and externally, natural light and car space and storage for each apartment, ” Ferraro said.
Dubbed as the world’s first B2B off-the-plan property portal, Investorist was developed by Ellis as a marketplace to connect Network Partners (agents, advisors and financial planners) from around the globe with high-quality property investments.
The website has increased transparency in a notoriously closed off marketplace, helping small businesses and sole traders access projects from big-name companies, without necessarily having an existing relationship with project seller.
Prior to Investorist, the only way a sales agent could get project information was to contact the developer directly and ask for it which resulted in a lot of out of hours calls for both parties, and time spent chasing up-to-date information.
If a developer made a change to the project or stock levels changed, often agents didn’t find out until after they had provided their client with the outdated information. Spreadsheets and e-mails were used to keep track of stock between all involved parties, which was time-consuming and often resulted in double sales.
As such Investorist was mooted by Ellis to offer a live, central source of information between the developer and their channels, where agents can access all project information at any given time including price lists, stock availability, floor plans and brochures.
“Our platform allows Network Partners to access complete and up-to-date information on a project at any time, without having to chase anyone up. We love hearing from customers how much more efficient their business has become since using Investorist” said Ellis.
In June 2015, Investorist was valued over $20 million and had attracted more than 5,000 users to its platform which lists over 50,000 properties to date.
Besides it head office in Melbourne, the company has presence in Sydney, Brisbane, Shanghai, Beijing, London, Singapore, Malaysia, Miami and soon New York.
