Hallmark Homes to head upmarket

The company, established almost 30 years ago by Graham Gilbertson and Tony Painter, has largely focused on the first-home buyer market and produces about 500 homes a year across southeast Queensland. But Sales Manager Anthony Gilbertson said the latest strategy was aimed at tapping into new revenue as first-home buyer sales fall away. “The way we see it is, the bottom end of the market has pretty much dropped off totally,” he said. “But there still are people with money around who want to build houses.”

Mr Gilbertson said Hallmark also wanted to take aim at builders offering “deceptively prices luxury options”. “There are plenty of operators offering premium designs, but they are so riddled with hidden costs and ‘optional features’ that the standard advertised price tends to blow out,” he said.

Hallmark, which produced revenue of more than $85 million a year, have just released its new Vogue Collection to target a higher-priced market. “A lot of high-end homes may appear to be well-price, but now more than ever misleading tactics are being used to lure buyers,” Mr Gilbertson said. “With the Vogue collection, we’re guaranteeing a ‘what you see is what you get’ approach, where a prospective buyer can visit one of our display homes and see exactly what the end product will look like. “Other companies will walk you through a feature-packed display home and give you a basic price which sounds great, but in order to have the end product looking anything like the display you’ve got to add on tens of thousands of dollars extra to the standard price.”

Hallmark’s push to build more luxury products comes despite forecasts from the Housing Industry Association of a 9 per cent slump in home construction over 2011. Mr Gilbertson said he expected this to create stiff competition between builders, and Hallmark were effectively cutting traditionally higher margins in the luxury end to gain a foothold into the sector. “We’re operating along the same margins as the rest of our products,” he said. “It just happens to be at a much lower margin than most other companies and that’s purely because we’ve got so much less overhead.”

Mr Gilbertson conceded that while bank lending had eased up over the past 18 months, “plenty of new home buyers are still going to struggle to get the necessary finance to do what they want.” But he said pricing would be a key to the company’s ability to secure new contracts. “We’ve never had a house that hasn’t valued up.”

Article was written by Nick Nichols and appeared in the Gold Coast Bulletin, February 5th 2011