It’s Chinese New Year again, so Kung Hei Fat Choi to all Hawaii Housing News readers! I was at the Empress restaurant the other night in the Chinese Cultural Plaza with some friends for a super fun dinner event, full of delicious Chinese food and talented performances. But I also started thinking about business, of course (sigh), and an idea popped into my mind as I was eating my kaoya (Beijing duck – SOOOO good).
If you live in a culturally diverse area like Hawaii, it’s important to know where the different ethnic populations tend to centralize. Knowing your local geography or ethnic settlement patterns can help when it’s time to sell your house or when you’re looking at possible investment properties. You may find that some ethnic groups have larger family sizes and are more likely to buy properties at premium with 4 bedrooms or more. Two weeks ago I checked out a townhouse in Pearl City that had almost eight people in its four average-sized bedrooms. You may find other groups to be more ‘investment savvy’ – if you are selling cash flowing properties, you may want to target these groups as potential buyers.
If you lean heavily on online marketing with a website or squeeze pages, you might want to have different language versions of your sites. There are some plugins for WordPress and Tumblr sites that are supposed to do an adequate job. Of course, you can always hire a college student or someone to do it for you to minimize errors. You want to make sure everyone can read your material, even if they can’t read English. No one said reading English was mandatory in buying your house!
Lastly, you may want to broaden your marketing to residents of other countries. As the market for different currencies is always in flux, there’s usually some group that views Hawaii or American real estate as the place to buy today because of their current purchasing power. China and Canada come immediately to mind as I write this. Right now they consider our local real estate in Hawaii to be a good investment. So make an extra effort to reach out to those folks and get them on your buyers list. They may waiting for one of your deals.