Developers Attract Home Buyers Through Charitable Works

As the real-estate market slows, many developers and builders are successfully attracting home buyers by tying sales to philanthropy, reports The Wall Street Journal.

Entries to the National Association of Home Builders’ annual award for builder charity work have more than doubled, to 56 in 2006 from 21 in 2005, showing a boost in the creation of charitably focused residential developments.

With help from the developer, Daybreak, a real-estate development in Salt Lake City, raised nearly $50,000 for cancer research during a two-year span. Other developments spread giving to a wide range of causes.

Bob Schultz, a sales-and-marketing consultant who advises developers and home builders in Boca Raton, Fla., said that in the wake of recent natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina and the California wildfires, “People want to do something more meaningful with their lives than bat a tennis ball around.”

Indeed, Robert Cullerton, a retired sales executive who recently bought a $926,000 home in the Georgia Club in Naples, Fla., a community that runs its own charitable foundation, said that he feels “part of the social fabric” in his new community. Mr. Cullerton told the newspaper that by participating in developer-sponsored charitable events, he has “made more friends in the past three months than I made in seven years at my old home in California.”