Julian Cohen is the founder of the Julian Cohen Group in Miami Beach.

Every week, we ask a Miami real estate professional for their thoughts on the top stories in Miami real estate.

This week, we talked with Julian Cohen, the founder of the Julian Cohen Group in Miami Beach. A graduate of the prestigious Leysin American School in Switzerland, Julian spent two years working for Platinum Properties on Wall Street, followed by another two years with Prudential Douglas Elliman (the leading residential real estate firm in New York City), before returning to Miami and working with the famed Jills team, where he closed on the sale of 3 Indian Creek village for $47,000,000, the highest priced sale in Miami-Dade county history.

Now, with the Julian Cohen Group of Coldwell Banker Previews International, Julian specializes in residential and commercial sales and investments, and has already exclusively listed more than $35 million in residential real estate.

Miami Agent (MA): Social media offers many new marketing avenues for agents; can you speak the successes you’ve had with social media, particularly Instagram?

Julian Cohen (JC): I noticed people in different fields taking advantage of social media and increasing business through the medium. I figured that for real estate, I could market properties and eventually, develop enough of a following base to expose the product to the right clientele.

So I started my own personal Instagram account targeted to the interests and lifestyles of the people who follow it. My followers include many wealthy, affluent buyers who, like everyone else, are looking for great deals, nice properties and nice designs. Hence, when I see the right opportunity, I post photos of properties with a short description that will appeal to my followers. I only post one photo of the property as a teaser to encourage them to contact me.

Little by little, people started noticing that I was always uploading great photos of beautiful properties, and this started a trigger in people’s minds. Whenever somebody brings up a beautiful property in the Miami area or they know somebody who is looking for a property or looking to sell, they think of me. I even hear it from my colleagues in my office.

A great example is a friend of mine, who also follows me on Instagram. Her mother was looking for a property, but had not found anything nice that she liked. So my friend said to her mom, “I know a Realtor named Julian Cohen, and he’s always putting up beautiful pictures of properties that he’s listing on his Instagram.” I ended up getting in contact with her mother, and after showing her properties, we found a beautiful $7 million property that she liked. The good news was that before she could buy it, she needed to sell her property. I ended up getting her beautiful home listed for $4.5 million. Both leads came from my activity on Instagram.

MA: We keep seeing analysis that prices are heading down in Miami’s housing market; is that consistent with what you’re seeing?

JC: Miami’s market is seasonal. An astute real estate professional watches the market closely to accurately advise customers what is going on in the market. As with all properties, it is dependent on the time frame a seller has to sell and a buyer has to buy. The skill comes with knowing how to accurately test the market in order to help both buyers and sellers achieve their goals in the time frame that is good for them.

So what you want to do is hire the right professional who can give you correct feedback from the market to help you position a home and to assist a buyer in getting what they want. There are different ways to market depending on when and where the market is in the slice of time the property is being exposed. My objective is that regardless of what the market may be doing in any given moment, is that the sellers and buyers both get what they need. In fact, my assessment would be that the market is very good right now, because it is very balanced and as close to a “normal” market as we have had in years.

MA: Finally, as many have noted, the home construction has returned to Miami; what areas do you think are poised for new construction?

JC: Many developers have been moving to capitalize on Miami’s market, but what has happened is that many have purchased land on the water for a high price, planning to build a mega mansion and sell it for an extreme amount of money. It’s very exciting.

Rather than deal with all that competition attempting to use the 3 Indian Creek concept, I took a different strategy. Prices are high on the water, but buyers who can’t afford to be on the water still want beautiful, contemporary homes.

So my strategy is to assist in raising the value of the dry properties, particularly in areas like Bal Harbour Village, where I am doing a development right now. The reason I like it is, you can still ask high numbers, but at a portion of the price of a waterfront property – and that development in Bal Harbour, for instance, is just a block away from the neighborhood’s private marina, where a buyer can still dock their boat of just about any size or take a short walk from the private home to the beach.

I believe buyers have begun to realize that they may not find what they want on the water, and I believe, “If you build it, they will come.”