Specialization is essential to a focused and targeted marketing approach in real estate.
That doesn’t mean you should only have one area of specialization. It may mean you have two or three, but in each advertisement you focus on a single niche.
A few examples of specialization include:
Small apartment owners with 10 or less units.
Retirement Condos.
Real Estate Investors on the East side of the City.
Doctors & Dentists who want to invest in real estate but don’t have a lot of free time.
Military Personnel that are transferring. Estates that are being probated.
Horse Properties. Agricultural Property. Small Businesses that want to own instead of lease.
The possibilities are endless and are only limited by conditions in your geographic location.
Once you have identified a specific niche to target, generating exclusive leads becomes child’s play. You research this group in great detail, learning what they like or dislike, what makes them tick and where they hang out (i.e. common groups, organizations, magazines, newsletters, social media, geographic areas, etc.) Once you know all this it is usually easy to find a way to get your information in front of them.
You learn about their specific needs and worries, you create solutions and you position yourself as the expert in their eyes by providing useful articles, free reports, white papers and other meaningful pieces of literature.
As an added benefit this also enables you to develop very specific systems, and systems are the key to creating huge profits. In fact, until you have developed systems you will be limited in the amount of real estate you sell and the free time you have available.
The opposite will be true when you have your systems developed and in place. You will find that your income potential is virtually unlimited and your free time is expanding. This is because you will get more and more efficient as you refine your system.
It is also easier to break the system into smaller pieces and start spreading out the work load. Give the $8.00/Hour work to those who are willing to work for $8.00/Hour and you spend all of your time doing the $200/Hour work. If you really do this you will find your income expanding exponentially. You may also find that you are creating a lot of leads outside your geographic area or area of expertise.
But what do you do with all those other leads?
Develop relationships with other agents in other areas. Find out what area and types of properties they specialize in. Offer to trade clients with them or just pay each other referral fees. You send them the clients that fit their specialization and they send you the ones that fit yours in return.
This will not only benefit you and the agents you are working with but also the clients who will get the benefit of working with a specialist in the area that suits their needs.
This may seem hard to do at first. Most agents don’t have enough leads so they spend their time working with anyone they can. Unfortunately this adds to the problem because they are wasting too much time on a few clients to have time left over to set up better systems. The problem here is they are not generating enough of their own exclusive leads so they feel they have to take every client they can get.
When the real solution to the problem is spending time improving your lead generation systems so that you always have more leads then you can possibly work with. This will change your whole attitude about leads and allow you the luxury of being choosy about who you will and won’t work with.
Andrew Thomas is Managing Director and Story Teller at ZipBrands. He has studied the Real Estate Business for years. He enjoys connecting with people, keeping updated with latest in the field of Real Estate and Business etc. He has also discovered great shortcuts that can help investors make better decisions when it comes to buying and selling. His work across multiple disciplines broadly addresses narratives of human experience. You can follow him on facebook also.
