Our Marketing Approach:  We at Trust Properties, Inc. emphasize the team approach to all of our clients’ properties in contrast to the traditional listing broker nesting on the exclusive hoping to get the commission from both sides of the deal (i.e., Listing and Sale).  You must be assured that the team representing you knows your property, and can answer questions when a prospect calls.  This team approach explains our success rate in selling and leasing our clients’ properties.  We cooperate with other brokers daily, but we still close 80 percent of our own deals. We believe the type of marketing approach outlined above will produce the fastest/most effective results and we strongly recommend you employ these criteria in your selection process for the marketing of any Washington, D.C. area properties.

During the course of marketing your property, you should rely on six primary mediums to bring your property to market.  In order of importance they are as follows:

1.        CoStar:  CoStar is a commercial database, encompassing more than 90 percent of all of the buildings and  properties located in the Greater Washington Metropolitan area. This database is used by all of the major brokerage firms on the East coast.  The database incorporates tax record information, legal description, size, type of property, availability, improvements, prices, and terms.  CoStar has its own team of data consultants who update and input information into the system on an ongoing basis. Additionally, brokers who have exclusive listings update their own information on their listed properties directly to CoStar.  These updates are sent to subscribing brokerages every two weeks, allowing CoStar to be the most effective regional marketing medium in use today and therefor any Broker selected for marketing your property should be a subscriber.

2.        Signage: We recommend placing signs on properties whenever possible, i.e., 2'´2' signs, 4'´4' signs, 4'´8' signs, 2'´20' banners, 4'´30' banners.  The bigger the sign, the better. Signs are one of the most effective methods of gaining the attention of Buyers who are new to the market area and Brokers searching for the acquisition needs of a new client.

3.        Cold-Calling:  This is the simplest and most fundamental of all marketing techniques, which every broker should do to be successful in marketing properties.  We accomplish this in two ways:  (i) we cold-call in person; (ii) we cold-call via the telephone.  The next call we make may be the right prospect for your property. We suggest you recruit only Brokers who are openly willing to employ this technique.

4.        MRIS:  The Metropolitan Regional Information Service (“MRIS”) is also a database, used primarily by residential and by traditionally smaller commercial brokers; and is a useful marketing tool that is not utilized by most of the larger national commercial brokerage firms.  Our experience is that residential agents sometimes do commercial deals, and toward that end we subscribe to this database and we recommend you choose a Broker who can provide this important listing service as part of the package being offered to you.

5.        Advertising:  Trust Properties, Inc.’s policy for advertising properties is that we do general advertising in local papers and trade magazines to market our clients’ properties.  This gives Trust Properties’s clients more flexibility.  We pay for all of the general advertising.  If specific or specialized advertising is requested by an individual client, the cost of the actual charges for publication is passed on to the client without a mark up or additional burdens. This advertising practice is customary in our marketplace and allows the client to choose the desired frequency of ad placement while monitoring the ad’s effectiveness.

6.        Mass E-mail:  The newest medium for the marketing of real estate is the internet.  Our method of marketing listings on the internet is to prepare a Power Point Presentation marketing package for each new listing.  We then take that presentation and email it as an attachment to all of the brokers on our email lists.  Our email lists are generated from a software program called CoStar Professional Directory.  By using this program we are able to get email addresses for real estate brokers that have completed transactions within a given geographic area.  With our mass e-mail capabilities we are able to get maximum exposure for our listings throughout the brokerage community.