The Ralph Lauren Playbook For Selling Houses • Bill Melnick

Keeping It Real Podcast • Secrets Of Top 1% REALTORS ® • Interviews With Real Estate Brokers & Agents

Bill Melnick discusses his transition from a 28-year executive career at Ralph Lauren to becoming a top luxury real estate agent in Litchfield County, Connecticut.

Key takeaways

• Bill Melnick leveraged his 28 years as Chief Merchandising Officer at Ralph Lauren to treat home sales as lifestyle storytelling rather than purely transactional square footage metrics.
• He successfully sold tennis legend Ivan Lendl's 445-acre Cornwall estate for $12 million in 2024, setting a county record after it previously languished near $20 million with another agent.

Main topics

• Lifestyle merchandising in real estate
• Luxury property pricing & valuation nuances

Notable quotes

Ralph Lauren was the first one to market himself as a lifestyle... So I have experience with, with both.

Conclusion

Melnick's career pivot demonstrates how transferable corporate branding skills and hyper-local expertise can

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) You've got a seller who's sure their home is worth more than the market says, and you're dreading the conversation. Today's guest sold a tennis legend's estate for $12 million, which is a county record, after it was first listed at nearly $20 million with another agent. He'll give you the one question that opens up the price talk without making you the bad guy. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping It Real is brought to you by Real Geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren't converting? Well, Real Geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose Real Geeks as their technology partner. Real Geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real Geeks also includes an easy-to-use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow-up conversations. Real Geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness. Visit realgeeks.com forward slash keepingitrealpod and find out why realtors come to Real Geeks to generate more business. Again, visit realgeeks.com forward slash keepingitrealpod. And now onto our show. Today's episode is brought to you by Corded.io. Are you looking for agents to join your brokerage or team? Now, as a real estate recruiter, I can tell you the answer is always yes, but most agents aren't looking to move right now. So how do you know who to contact? Well, what if I were to tell you there's a recruiting and retention tool powered by artificial intelligence that shows you exactly which agents in your local market. are looking to leave their brokerage right now, and which agents at your own firm are also looking to leave you. Now, I've been recruiting realtors for 15 years, and I've hired over 2,000 agents. I can tell you with no exaggeration, this is the tool I've been waiting for. Corded's AI looks for trends across dozens of variables for each agent in your market and shows you which agents they believe are likely to move. Not only does it do that, but Corded's AI went and visited my recruiting website and read everything I offer. So now when I'm recruiting, Corded's AI tells me exactly what to say based on that agent's needs and what my brokerage can offer. It even writes emails for me. I've never seen anything like it and I use it every single day. Now, if you are looking to grow your brokerage, Corded.io is the best tool out there. Visit Corded.io to schedule a demo. Again, that's Corded.io. And now, on to the show. Speaker 2 (3:06) Welcome to Keeping It Real, the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris. I'm your guide and host through the show. And today, our guest is Bill Melnick. I'm going to tell you more about Bill. Bill has spent 28 years at... spent 28 years rather at ralph lauren rising to chief merchandising officer before reinventing himself as one of litchfield county's most recognized luxury real estate agents since joining elise harney real estate in 2019 he has closed over 207 transactions totaling over 144 million in volume, including a county record $12 million sale of tennis legend Ivan Lendl's 445-acre Cornwall estate. His corporate background gives him a distinct edge, polished negotiation skills, a wide New York City sphere of influence, and a refined eye for design that resonates with discerning buyers. So Bill is licensed in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New York. It's a triple threat and has been quoted in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times. and also appeared on Fox Business Channel. I want everybody to follow Bill at his Instagram, which is Bill underscore Melnick, M-E-L-N-I-C-K, underscore real, underscore estate. Again, Bill underscore Melnick, underscore real, underscore estate on Instagram. We'll have a link to that in the show notes. No need to type it in. Welcome, Bill. Speaker 1 (4:32) How are you doing? Speaker 2 (4:33) I am good and grateful that you are here. I want to jump right in. with your previous career at Ralph Lauren. You were there at 28 years. And the way I always think about Ralph Lauren is they don't really sell clothing or they don't sell shirts, I guess maybe to be the easiest way to say it. Ralph Lauren really sold a life that you wanted to step into, at least the way I think about that brand. And when you walk into a listing appointment now, what do you see in the house? that maybe the agent before you walked right past and missed right Speaker 1 (5:12) right so you're right ralph lauren was the first one to market himself as a lifestyle a lot of the advertising was lifestyle driven and not product driven or not specific product driven which was revolutionary in the industry for both him and bruce weber at the time was shooting the ads so that gave me a different perspective on how to promote and how how to market um things. So not every company was doing that. I worked for the gap for a little bit of time as well. And their marketing and advertising approach was way more product focused. So I have experience with, with both. But for me, in real estate now, as I transitioned, that lifestyle merchandising experience has been really invaluable. So, you know, Knowing the luxury customer from all those years of dealing with them in a different part of their lives, you kind of get to know what they're looking for. And they're looking for 360 degrees of lifestyle. So they're looking for the location. They're looking for the cachet. They're looking for the beautiful home, the view. And you have to present all of that to them in a cohesive and coherent way. Speaker 2 (6:29) Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. And I didn't even think about the merchandising part of Ralph Lauren, which of course is huge. And just its visual appearance in stores, how they position the clothing. They have their own shops. Well, they don't just have their own shops. They sell in a lot of different retail shops. So merchandising is everything for them in addition to selling the lifestyle brand. So I'm curious, if we think about... the last listing you took, just to come up with an example, from the first walkthrough through the photo shoot. So what did you change? So when you have a listing, how important is it for you to stage the listing, for example, or make changes to the physical attributes of the internal part of the home? It's like, what do you take out? What do you keep? Do you leave everything as is? Just curious about your approach there. Speaker 1 (7:25) Sure, sure. So we're lucky enough to have a lot of beautiful homes that are already pre-staged so that, you know, the sellers might have had a decorator or have a great eye themselves. You know, the biggest thing for staging for me is moving around furniture a little bit, but it's really editing. It's all in the edit. There can't be too much clutter, even in a beautiful home that's been, you know, already styled. You have to remove some of the clutter so people can imagine what their stuff would look like in the space. So that's the number one biggest thing I think is to remove anything that becomes kind of visual pollution from a photographic standpoint because there's just too much. And that's a different way of photographing an environment than if you were photographing it for editorial for a magazine or something. It has to be a little bit more. real estate focused with the mix of the editorial vignettes small corners and so forth as well so you get the full picture of the actual practicality of the house as well as the um you know the aesthetic and the luxury aspect of it as well when Speaker 2 (8:37) even though your luxury clients you know usually do have really beautifully um done interiors and different fixtures and all sorts of wonderful, beautiful parts of the house. If there's something that you're like, that is not like a weird wallpaper or something that they think is beautiful and lovely, but maybe doesn't translate to the entire population of potential buyers. Do you have those tough conversations or are you usually able to work around it? I'm just curious. Speaker 1 (9:11) Absolutely. So and most of the sellers are open to it, they ask your opinion. But in some rooms, a can of white paint goes a long way. You know, it needs to be appealing to a broad spectrum of people. You know, also, when we give advice to our clients who have already bought houses, and they're doing renovations, and so forth, and they ask our opinion on what's the best. Speaker 1 (9:36) thing they could do now that's an investment in their future sale of the house you know i i suggest to them to make it beautiful and make it quality but when you remove all your stuff from it all the high-end fixtures should be relatively neutral neutral stone um some neutral trim paint um all that kind of stuff so and then you know anyone's stuff looks good against that background yeah Speaker 2 (9:59) that's a really good point and and i'm sure there's times where you look at countertops that haven't been updated in 20 years just because homeowners didn't need to. And I imagine sometimes you have to have those conversations like, hey, it might make sense to swap out this granite for quartz or a different color. I imagine even big changes like that I'm sure have happened. Speaker 1 (10:24) Yeah, it is. And you have to sometimes an old neutral colored countertop is better than a new pink one. So, you know, it's you also have to balance it with what will you know, you're selling an expensive home. A person means is going to come in and look at it and they might just be replacing it anyway. So it's all that balance. Speaker 2 (10:47) Yeah, that's true. I guess when you're dealing in the luxury space, there's probably more of a readiness to make those big changes, even after the sale, because they might have designers or people that are kind of come in anyway and make all sorts of changes. So you've said before that buyers, they're not, they don't buy square footage, really, what they're buying is frontage, which is views and an experience you can't really replicate. So a lot of agents that I talked to believe the comps are the comps period. And where does the lifestyle story stop working? And the price per foot actually wins? I'm curious where that shows up. Speaker 1 (11:30) Okay, well, there's a lot of adjustments to be to be made to be made in these situations. And it's very funny, I'm dealing with a few New York agents, New York City agents right now as clients who can't have a hard time. Speaker 2 (11:43) Paul King, Speaker 1 (11:43) Getting past the square footage, so you know we have we have different things up here, we have lakefront you know that can add $2 million to the property right away, just for a small lot you know big mountain. Paul Speaker 2 (11:57) King, Speaker 1 (11:57) views get out, you know, millions of $2 million to the price right away pools, for instance, get 200 to a quarter million dollars to the price of the property location, whether the property has a lot of acreage. Is it usable acreage? Is it abutting conservation land? Can people build around you and ruin your view? All that has to be taken into account. So it's a much more complicated equation than just doing square footage. Speaker 2 (12:26) And if you don't know that you're coming in from an outside market, somebody from New York City is moving out to Connecticut, they might... the agent might not know any of this and so you then have to educate them i imagine yeah yeah yeah Speaker 1 (12:43) you have to you have to be educated on the new nuances of the of the community and of your market so for us you know views conservation land mountains um lake frontage pools these are all things that you know add to the value of of the home Speaker 2 (13:05) You know, I was thinking about this as you were just talking about the particulars of your market and how a lot of that isn't so obvious in looking at comps, whereas it's really the experience of the individual agent who has been working in the market. I'm wondering if that really helps stave off AI. Speaker 2 (13:30) sort of consumers going direct to AI or really exclusively relying upon AI for pricing or offers. I imagine a lot of that information AI hasn't figured out yet how to grab all of that data, put it into a readable format. So I imagine, I'm just thinking out loud, have you found that that's the case that like AI really just can't yet? know all of that. And so it really makes you super valuable. Whereas a lot of agents who maybe don't have that kind of knowledge about their local market may be in trouble because AI can do a lot of that. So I'm just curious if that resonates. Speaker 1 (14:09) Absolutely, it does. And even, you know, younger agents or newer agents, I would advise them to be careful how much they use AI. I mean, I'm finding some people are every email they're responding to, you can tell they use AI. It's really the worst. And it's such a turnoff, especially for a sophisticated buyer. So, you know, having that local knowledge, I think that the buyers are smarter than you think. And they don't like the, they don't like the uniformity and the no personality and the canned answers of AI. and you can recognize it now a mile away. I actually think it's also, you know, we talked about this briefly before we started, the advantage of being in a boutique or a non-national real estate firm. You know, it feels more authentic to the buyers and you're considered the hometown hero or, you know, the real expert in the market. Speaker 2 (15:11) Yeah, I agree. I think that's, it's really nice because we hear so much about how AI is replacing or certainly has the opportunity to replace lots of different industry jobs and not just necessarily lower level jobs. And so it's nice to hear that AI still can't do what really successful agents. do and hopefully never can. So I have a question. This is kind of putting you on the spot and I'm not going to give you a lot of detail here. So I'm curious just to get your overall thought. So let's say somebody listening, one of our listeners has a $450,000 three bedroom house. They're about to push live, you know, in the next week or so. So no lake, no 200 year old barn, nothing super interesting and unique, just a, just a regular old. three bedroom home, $450,000. What would you say is the Ralph Lauren move? What's the first thing they should do that you would recommend? Just kind of thinking back to your Ralph Lauren days. Speaker 1 (16:15) Oh yeah. Well, first off, the photographs are going to be key as we know in selling the house. So walking through every room that you're going to photograph with a different eye, the angle where the camera's going to be and what it's going to look like in terms of, you know, how the furniture could lay out in the room.