If you know anything about real estate right now, you know that inventory is tight. In this market, you simply can’t wait for sellers to come to you. You’ve got to go find them! And you find them by farming for prospects.
Geographic farming is a proven technique when it comes to an agent’s long-term success. You need to find the right neighborhoods, crunch data to determine if they’re ripe and effectively market yourself to the homeowners in the area over a sustained period.
You build a farm, then harvest it for leads!
If you’re not familiar with geographical farming, here’s a simplified explanation: A farm is an area, usually a neighborhood, that you identify as having great potential to market yourself to in order to find prospects and clients.
Find your farm and dig.
So how do you figure out if a neighborhood is worth targeting? Turnover rate is one of the most important factors to consider. Turnover is a percentage of how many homes have sold in a defined area in a year. For example, if an area has 100 homes, and 10 are sold in a year, the turnover rate is 10%. A good rule of thumb is that your farm area must have at least a 5% turnover rate for you to invest in targeting it. Watch this quick five-minute video for a walkthrough on how to do it…
Another important thing to look for when doing this research is to see if a market is dominated by one agent already. This is a keen way to find out who you’re up against. If it’s one agent, see what’s working for them. If it’s many agents, that might tell you that not one single agent has a hold on the area, and that could be your window of opportunity!
Market yourself to your farm.
After you’ve found your area and done your homework to make sure the farm is fertile, you need to market yourself to those homeowners. You’ll need to apply a mix of marketing tactics, over at least a one-year period, including email, social media posts, phone calls, door knocking (post COVID, of course) and, perhaps most importantly, direct mail.
Finding sellers and getting listings should be the top priority for every practicing REALTOR®. Get started and farm for prospects today to have listings tomorrow. Good luck, farmer!
If you want to dig even deeper and sharpen your farming skills further, be sure to check out: RPR’s Ultimate Guide to Geographic Farming. It goes in depth to explain every last detail to help get you up and running. Good luck, farmer!
