Move over, Disneyland. There’s a new competitor for the term “the happiest place on earth.” It’s Stapleton, the new town that occupies the former home of the Denver airport.
While other major developments have gone to seed during the housing recession, Stapleton has flourished, according to Tasha Jones, director of marketing at Forest City Stapleton, who told the Pacific Coast Builders Conference in San Francisco that the new town is on track to record its third best sales year ever in 2012.
Forest City Enterprises, the developer of the mammoth 4,700-acre property within the Denver city limits, “fought the urge to go quiet” and wait out the downturn, Jones told the conference. Instead, it kept talking, and making sure residents and future buyers were happy with their choice of Stapleton as their new home.
Jones, who spoke during a session titled “Rational Exuberance,” said there’s no silver bullet that keeps the buyers coming. Rather, it takes “a fully integrated marketing plan that creates optimism, gives people confidence that [the developer is] vested, and tells them they made the right choice.”
Stapleton is planned for some 12,000 homes, and with 4,000 sales to date, it “has another 10-15 years to go,” Jones said. So, “rather than let it all unravel,” the developer adopted a three-pronged approach that first and foremost made people want to buy by showing them they weren’t making a mistake. “We give them a reason to buy,” the marketing expert said.
The developer also used “joy and humor” to get people excited about the huge property, where redevelopment of the old airport began in 1991. Joy and humor “are healthy,” Jones said, “We had to show people Stapleton is a good place, so we turned off selling and turned on the fun. And with that, we didn’t let the market or the competition say what Stapleton is. We did.”
Forest City also decided to “feed and water” the market daily, Jones told the session. “We invested in a marketing budget that told the market we were alive and well by spreading happiness, which breeds buyer confidence.”
