What It Really Takes to Create Demand in Second-Home Real Estate
By Brian Hull, President and Broker at Martis Camp Realty.
In luxury real estate – particularly in remote, second-home markets – success isn’t about “build it and they will come” because demand rarely appears on its own. Buyers don’t simply discover these places by accident. They need to be compelled to look, visit, and act.
For agents and developers working outside major metropolitan markets, the work is less about waiting for traffic and more about generating exposure, engagement, and momentum. Over the years, my experience at Martis Camp, a 2,177-home residential community just outside the Lake Tahoe basin, has reinforced a simple truth: demand must be created intentionally, long before true market momentum emerges.
Creating a Market
Many new second-home communities are off the beaten path and not naturally aligned with an established buyer market. When this is the case, agents and developers must focus on a broader value proposition, rather than solely the real estate itself. Helping buyers fully understand what is to come, lifestyle, community, and long-term vision is essential to creating meaningful demand.
The takeaway for agents:
- If your property lacks a single, headline-grabbing feature, you must stack value through lifestyle, access, and experience.
- Buyers need a clear answer to the question, “Why here instead of somewhere else?”
In practice, this means:
- Defining what makes the community meaningfully different
- Consistently reinforcing that message across every touchpoint
- Most importantly, getting buyers on site
Second-home markets are unique. People vacation, fall in love with a place, and they start imagining themselves owning a slice of it because the emotional attachment almost always happens in person. But you can’t wait for that realization to happen organically. The goal of marketing therefore, isn’t just awareness – it’s physical tours of the property. Every campaign and outreach effort should ultimately support that outcome.
Marketing as an Investment, Not an Expense
One of the most common mistakes in luxury development is expecting marketing to behave like a light switch: turn it on, get instant results. Marketing is a long-term play and functions more like compound interest.
For agents and brokerages, this means:
- Shifting expectations away from immediate ROI
- Measuring progress through engagement, database growth, repeat visits, and referrals, and not just closed deals
- Staying consistent even when results aren’t immediate
Long-term exposure builds familiarity, and familiarity builds trust. Over time, even prospects who never purchase can amplify your message through their networks. This extended reach is difficult to quantify, but impossible to replace.
How to apply this:
- Track engagement over time, not just conversions
- Reinvest in channels that consistently bring qualified prospects into your ecosystem
- Treat your database as a long-term asset, not a short-term sales list
A Two-Pronged Approach: Macro Vision + Product Excitement
Successful buyer acquisition blends two core elements:
- The Macro: Consistent messaging of the broader lifestyle and community story –why this place, why now, what does it feel like to be here.
- The Micro: The individual property – the product that stirs emotion, matches aspiration, and drives urgency to act.
Agents often lean too heavily on one or the other. The strongest strategies integrate both. It’s important for agents to lead with lifestyle to create aspiration; follow up with product specifics to create action; and maintain consistent messaging so prospects stay engaged before, during, and after their visit.
At Martis Camp Realty, this strategy is woven into everything we do from our messaging cadence to our technology stack, and we run our brokerage with the mindset that we are not just promoting the quality of the real estate, but arguably equally important, the lifestyle that comes with it.
Evolving with the Market
Market cycles change, sometimes abruptly, and we have seen these shifts become more dramatic especially in the last decade. Demand surges, then stabilizes. In these moments, the instinct to pull back on marketing is understandable, but it’s often counterproductive because you can’t just throw capital at a project and expect success. Momentum, once lost, is difficult to rebuild.
For agents and developers, the lesson is clear:
- Marketing should expand and contract strategically, not disappear
- Fully integrated sales, marketing, and PR efforts help stabilize demand across cycles
- Visibility during quieter periods often positions a project to outperform when conditions improve
Hope is not a strategy, and pipelines must be built deliberately. After 19 years our Martis Camp Realty team is proud to still represent 96% of all home sellers while, perhaps even more impressive, generating over 83% of all buyers to the community.
The Bottom Line
In second-home and resort real estate, success requires thinking beyond construction and inventory. Demand follows clarity of vision, consistency of messaging, and commitment to experience.
For agents, the most valuable shift is mental: stop waiting for the market to show up and start designing the path that brings the right buyers to the table. When done well – and sustained over time – that investment doesn’t just generate sales. It builds destinations and that’s when a community like Martis Camp truly begins to thrive.
Martis Camp Realty DRE License #01997809
