ABSTRACT
After a period of using commercially available segmentation schemes, Douthit Communications, Inc. (DCI), had become dissatisfied with changes in the scheme and with the support it was getting from research provided by the vendor. The decision was made in late 1990 to develop a proprietary scheme for residential real estate similar to the syndicated scheme it was currently using. American LIVES was retained and conducted a random-sample mail survey of the Denver, Colorado, real estate market (American LIVES, 1991); Denver was then and still is one of the bigger markets for DCI’s Homes Illustrated division of homes-for-sale magazines, as well as the headquarters of ReMax, Inc., a major national real estate brokerage firm. The survey sampled Denver housing sales for the previous eighteen months. Of 1, 153 valid names and addresses of recent house buyers acquired from a mailing list service to whom surveys were mailed, there was a return of approximately 500 questionnaires, for a 43 percent response rate. American LIVES deemed the response rate adequate for all the statistical analyses to be performed for its segmentation study.
