Search Pinterest for “luxury real estate” to see what comes up. You might see a sprawling Greenwich, Conn., estate, a secluded waterfront property in Victoria, B.C., or a mountain-view ski home in Northern California.

In addition to traditional high-end properties, you’ll see the more whimsical - treehouse homes and beach houses over the water with glass-bottom floors.

Bottom line: real estate professionals, developers and design-build firms are leveraging Pinterest to sell luxury real estate. Pinterest is becoming a popular platform to market custom homes, resort properties, vacation homes, country club memberships and so on. If you want to create buzz around a real estate project before breaking ground, take a lesson from the Property Brothers, create 3D Illustrations or Virtual Reality Marketing and then post them on Pinterest. 

Why Pinterest for Luxury Real Estate?

Sheer numbers are one reason. The Pinterest social media platform had some 70 million users and growing as of January 2014. With the exception of Facebook, the site drives more traffic to company websites than any social media platform, including Twitter and LinkedIn. Among the most popular categories on Pinterest: home and travel.

Demographics play a role. The average Pinterest user, with a household income of $100,000 per year, has money to spend. That’s just the average, suggesting that plenty of Pinterest users are people who can afford to buy luxury real estate.

Finally, Pinterest does two things for its users: offers inspiration and ideas, and allows them to collect and sort pictures and videos of items they want to buy. When a Pinterest user is thinking of buying a vacation property or new home, there’s a good chance they’ll use the site to gather ideas. If you’re not using Pinterest, they’re coming across competing properties and viewing properties on your competitors website.

Generating Luxury Real Estate Leads with Pinterest

To get started with Pinterest, create a business profile. The process is intuitive; anyone can do it. The next step is to create boards on specific topics related to your business. Topics might include luxury real estate, vacation homes or high-end renovation ideas. 

Populate those pinboards with photos and 3D renders of your work, but also, pin photos and videos of other projects you like. Pinterest users want ideas and inspiration, not just marketing. You might not want to post photographs of a competing project across town, but if you’re selling beachfront condos in Florida, you’re safe posting pictures of ski cottages in Vail.

Here are some tips for getting your photos or 3D Illustrations noticed:

Write descriptions - Each photo should have a description of the photographs that includes keywords. Keywords like “custom home in Georgia” or “beach house on Cape Cod” help people who are searching for those properties find your images.

#Usehashtags - These are just as valuable on Pinterest as they are on Twitter - maybe even more so.

Monitor trends - Pay attention to what’s trending on any given day. If the topics are related to luxury real estate and your business, pin to those boards and include those hashtags.

Add rich pins capability - With just a few extra steps, rich pins add details like a maps, addresses, a link to your website and your logo. This helps Pinterest users learn more about your properties and get in touch with you.