Real estate farming is a lead generation strategy designed to position you as an area’s go-to agent using high-quality marketing targeted to homeowners in a specific suburb. Done successfully, you can capture 30%+ of all sales in your target area and establish a reliable source of annual income. Want to become your suburb's go-to agent?
If so, farming is a must-have strategy for you. Its goal is to consistently deliver value and showcase your market expertise in your farm area.
Real Estate Farming 101: Basic Strategy + Cost to Get Started
1. Target the Right suburb
The success of your real estate farming operation depends on choosing the right area. A good farm is 500 homes or less. Choose a place where there’s healthy demand (a good absorption rate) and where homes are being listed for sale at a solid clip (a good turnover rate). Ideally, choose a place where you’ve got some name recognition and some built-in expertise.
Living in your local suburb and farming that area is one of the best ways to start. Be part of your community and your neighbourhood.
2. Plan How & When to Deliver Value to Your Farm
Agents crushing the real estate farming game are delivering consistent value to homeowners 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 precious face-time for client conversations that will move your prospects closer to a transaction.
Examples of successful real estate farming outreach include letterbox drops, market updates, social media, and community websites/pages. Create a calendar with each message you’re planning to send, and note what value it will provide to your audience. How does it contribute to your overall goals?
Provide consistent updated on what is happening in that suburb. Letterbox drop your recently sold, just listed, market reports while also creating ads in Facebook using the same content and targeting that specific demographic in your suburb.
@realty's in house marketing team provides you with custom marketing strategies and content to provide value to your clients. We don't expect you to be marketing geniuses that what you have the marketing team for!
3. Make a Plan to Manage & Track Your Leads
The contacts you make in your farm area result from your consistent effort to build relationships with people in your area. Those efforts are tied to the budget and time you allocate to farming.
To save you time, the @realty CRM helps you tag farm contacts, automate digital communication like email or text messages, and create a record of the value you’ve delivered over the life of your farm. Plus, the CRM provides an easy system to track every reply and ensure you promptly follow up on every point of contact.
Let the CRM do all the hard work for you!
4. Execute Your Plan: Start Delivering Value!
You’ve done all the prep work, and now it’s time to execute. You’ve chosen the right farm area, made a plan to deliver consistent, long-term value, and set up a system to help you manage and track your interactions.
Now, it’s time to set your automated communication plans in motion and start the clock on the high-touch outreach you’ll do to follow up with 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 the communities you’re serving, and your clients (and your wallet!) will thank you!
Real Estate Farming: Cost to Get Started
Annual Real Estate Farm Cost: 500 Homes
DL flyers QTY 500 X 8 = $920.00
A6 Sold/ Just Listed Cards QTY 500 X 12 = $1,320.00
A4 Market Update Letters QTY 500 X 4 = $680.00
Social Media Lead Generation = $3,600.00
Website Hosting = $660.00
TOTAL: $7,180.00 per year
While this is a sizable investment, don’t forget to look at the upside. If you’re farming a suburb where the typical home sells for $400,000, a single 3% commission is worth $12,000 in gross commission income (GCI).
A single property sale will likely recuperate all your investment and then some. If you’re turning over three or four transactions a year from your farm area, the positive return on investment (ROI) is clear.