Very quietly, the Gindi family, mainly through Gindi Holdings Ltd. and Gindi Investments 1 Ltd. (TASE: GIND.B1), has developed a new model for selling apartments in the post-buyers groups era. On Friday, Gindi Holdings drew 6,500 people to the Tel Aviv Exhibition Grounds, where it sold nearly all of the apartments in its One and Only residential project in Petah Tikva - 519 of the project's 523 apartments.
In March, Gindi Investments used a similar sales fair to sell 182 apartments in two hours for its Gindi City project in Ramle.
One of the banners borne by buyers groups, and one of their main advantages in obtaining bank financing for projects, is that all the homebuyers are known in advance, in contrast to projects by contractors, who sell apartments one by one through agents or at a sales office on the building site. Projects are often built on the basis of the rate of sales.
Now that buyers groups are disintegrating under regulatory restrictions, such as increasing the cost of loans taken by members of the buyers groups, and slashing the tax breaks, the Gindi family is teaching the real estate market a lesson in sales and marketing.
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on July 4, 2010
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