What is Geographic Farming?
Geographic farming, is a proven method of marketing your real estate business to a local housing estate or neighbourhood in a way that raises awareness of your personal real estate brand, and will also help you get property buyer leads, referrals and property listings. Geographic farming provides an excellent opportunity to connect with potential home sellers. But what should you consider when selecting your local area to farm? This article will show you how to be successful with geographic farming and be able to become the local real estate expert and generate continuous leads, listings, and referrals.
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How to become Property Expert in Your Local Area?
Real estate geographical farming is a lead generation strategy designed to position you as a local area’s go-to agent and property expert, using high-quality marketing targeted to homeowners in a specific neighbourhood. If done successfully, you can capture 30%+ of all sales in your target housing area and establish a reliable source of annual sales.
Real estate farming is a must-have strategy for all high achiever property agents. The goal is to consistently deliver value and showcase your real estate market expertise in your local farm area. Here are some steps to follow to get started.
1. Target the Right Local Neighbourhood
The success of your real estate farming operation depends on choosing the right area to target. A good farm size is 500 properties or less. Choose an area where there is high demand, and high turnover. Ideally, you should choose a place where you’ve got some name recognition and some built-in expertise.
2. Plan How to Deliver Value to Your Local Area
Property agents successful in the real estate geographic farming game are delivering consistent value to property owners in their farm areas. The key to this step is to plan the “what,” “when,” and “how” in advance. That way, you can reserve your time for real client conversations that will move your prospects closer to an actual transaction.
Examples of successful real estate farming outreach include postcards, market updates, social media, and property websites. Create a calendar with each message you’re planning to send, and note what value it will provide to your target audience. How does it contribute to your overall goals?
3. Make a Plan to Manage & Track Your Leads & Listings
The contacts you get in your geographic farming area results from your consistent effort to build relationships with people in and around your area. Those efforts are also tied to the budget and time you allocate to real estate farming.
To be more efficient, you should use a good real estate CRM (customer relationship manager) that helps you manage your contacts, automate digital communication like email or Whatsapp text messages, and create a record of the value you’ve delivered over the life of your farm. Real estate CRMs provides an easy system to track every reply and ensure you promptly follow up on every point of contact.
4. Execute Your Geographic Farming Plan & Start Delivering Value!
Now that you have done all the preparation work, and now it’s time to execute your plan. You have chosen the right location and farm area, made a plan to deliver consistent & long-term value, and set up a system to help you manage and track your leads.
Now, it’s time for action and to set your automated communication plans in motion and start sending out your postcards, social posts, and market updates.
Successful real estate farming is a combination of long-term automated communication and smart, day-by-day, personal follow-up. If you treat farming as a set-it-and-forget-it strategy, you won’t be as effective. Be active in your local target area, and your clients will appreciate you!
Essential Real Estate Farming Tools You Need To Succeed
Successful real estate farming requires a high level of organisation, a solid plan for execution, and, of course, the tools you will need to consistently deliver value to your local farm area. While these tools could include anything that will get your marketing message to your target audience, here are the strategies we have found work best for real estate farming.
1. Real Estate Postcards & Flyers
The backbone of your farming campaign strategy is your real estate farming postcards and flyers. These are ideal tools to convey valuable messages, stats, and authority to your local farm area. Use them to deliver a property market report, home valuations, or interesting stats.
2. Local Area Specific Content on Your Website
Your farm area should have a dedicated section on your property website where you can post weekly updates about the local neighbourhood market, goings-on in the neighbourhood, and even events of interest to community members in and around town.
Your real estate website can serve two purposes: to act as an online hub for your local neighbourhood to stop by and see what’s going on, and to show potential buyers interested in purchasing in your chosen area that you’re the local go-to expert when they are ready to buy a property.
3. Property Market Update Emails
Your real estate email newsletter is an ideal way to share market deep-dives since you have more space for in-depth thought and analysis. Talk about what’s going on in your local area and share messages that communicate to your farm that you’re the local property expert when it comes to buying and selling homes and LIVING in your local community.
