Banner Elk, North Carolina

Terrell Rhye, a successful Charleston businessman owned a stunning 17th Century inspired Scottish stone manor that sat high atop the beautiful gated community of Tynecastle in Banner Elk, NC. This 8+ acre estate boasted magnificent views of Grandfather Mountain and the surrounding mountainscapes of the North Carolina High Country.

Mr. Rhye’s growing business interests demanded more of his time and thus, drastically limited his opportunities to visit and enjoy this gorgeous mountain getaway. He initially put the estate on the market in mid-2008. After working with several agents over the next few years and offering multiple price reductions, Mr. Rhye realized that this one-of- a-kind “castle-style” property needed a unique and wide-reaching approach to accomplish the sale he desired. After observing many successful luxury home sales achieved by Interluxe, he enlisted Interluxe and its online auction platform to help him maximize the buyer awareness of his beautiful property.

The previous challenge was that local listing efforts just weren’t expansive enough to reach the limited pool of luxury buyers for a truly unique property like this grand manor. Interluxe’s challenge was to find these qualified luxury buyers, engage them to come forward in an accelerated timeframe and then motivate them to compete in the transparent format of the online auction to generate the highest possible sale price.

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Utilizing our proven process of analytics and targeted marketing capabilities we promoted the tremendous lifestyle opportunities that this property offered, to a local, regional, national and even international buyer audience. All the while emphasizing the time specific availability that this property would have via the auction. Buyers now knew that they would have to take action and bid or lose out on a property they really desired to own. No more waiting to see when the next price reduction might occur.

We determined that the likely buyer would come from either the Carolina’s, Georgia, or Florida since these areas are consistent feeder markets for visitors and property owners in the NC mountains. As a result, we focused our intense marketing muscle on these geographic areas via comprehensive online advertising, targeted direct mail, email marketing, and select print advertising. An aggressive public relations campaign and 3 days of open- house previews immediately prior to the auction start date rounded out the effort to call these prospective buyers to action. This would indeed be a buying opportunity event not to be missed!

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The aggressive Interluxe marketing campaign was immensely effective. There were over 7,000 unique visitors to the Banner Elk property page on the Interluxe website. From this, Interluxe received almost 100 inquiries from prospective buyers during the marketing effort leading up to the auction start date. During the 3-day preview/open house, 20 families toured the property in-person. The seller stated that our efforts had resulted in more activity during the 45-day marketing campaign than he’d had in the entire combined 5+ years that the property had been listed.

This intensive focus on the Banner Elk “castle” property resulted in 4 bidders who participated in the auction. The listing agent, who had no previous experience with real estate auctions was a willing and very helpful partner throughout process. She stated, only half-jokingly, “after all the tremendous efforts of Interluxe, if an offer comes in over $750K her seller better take it or she just might beat him over the head.” Well, that painful option never came to pass for the seller, as the property sold after 5 days of active bidding for $835,000.

The seller was very relieved to finally have the property sold after years of previous traditional efforts didn’t produce the results he’d hoped for. The listing agent was quite pleased as well to get this unique listing sold for a price higher than even she expected and has since worked with Interluxe on additional luxury listings in the NC High Country.