Creating your real estate niche by choosing and farming a geographic area is a smart idea – as long as you’re looking at your career in real estate as a long term proposition.
To be effective, you need to market regularly to all the residents in your chosen area. If you want to become known as the agent to call, you need to be in front of those residents every few weeks. That means contacting them once this year and not again until next year is pretty much a waste of time and money. You MAY get a 1% return – or you may get no results at all.
How to choose your territory:
- Choose an area that’s not too far from home base.
- Choose an area with houses you like, owned by the kind of people you like.
- Take a look at the average turnover in homes.
Before you begin spending your money on mass mailings, do some research. Look at the percentage of homes that are sold in the neighborhood from year to year. Some neighborhoods are more settled – that is, the residents tend to stay for 20 or 30 years. In other neighborhoods, people tend to come and go more often. If you can get the statistics, look back before the whole mortgage crisis to see what was the norm. That neighborhood may have been experiencing low turn-over because homeowners were underwater.
If prices have come back up so they can sell with some equity, there may be a large number ready to get moving.
For more about Choosing a real estate niche, what it is, and why you should have one:
Are you afraid to choose a niche?
Image courtesy of Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
