📬 Realtors who want to learn how to farm a neighborhood or improve their farming strategy should watch this video.
📖 Video Chapters
0:01 How to Farm a Neighborhood
1:05 Look at Your Neighborhood Turnover Ratio
1:45 Search for Realtors in Your Farm Area
2:27 How Many Homes do You Want to Farm?
2:48 Find Out Which Homes are MOST LIKELY to SELL in Your Farm
3:05 Circle Prospecting Your Listing Strategy
3:46 Run Facebook and Instagram Ads to Your Farm Area
4:27 Target Your Farm Area with Email Marketing
4:51 Most Effective Direct Mail Pieces with Best Call-To-Action
➡️ Contact Jerad Larkin with Chicago Title for free access to Title Toolbox
Today, I wanna talk to you about real estate farming and how you can effectively farm a neighborhood, and I'm gonna walk you through from start to finish on picking a neighborhood, making sure it's a good neighborhood, and how to effectively farm that neighborhood, so that you are popping up everywhere, and people are thinking of you the next time they want to sell their home.
I'm Jerad Larkin. I'm with Chicago Title. I share real estate tools, resources, and marketing ideas, and I also teach classes for real estate professionals here in Colorado. Check out my website milehightitleguy.com and sign up for my video email newsletters, where I share more resources and ideas like this video right here, and today we're talking about farming.
So, you wanna farm a neighborhood. Maybe that means you wanna send out direct mail. Maybe you want to door knock. Maybe you wanna walk the neighborhood. You want to get more listings in a specific neighborhood. Step one is just to check and make sure that you have chosen a good neighborhood.
So, what I would recommend is go ahead and log into our resource here through Chicago Title - It's called Title Toolbox. If you don't have access to Title Toolbox, contact me. I'd be happy to set you up with a free account. Title Toolbox will allow you to map out your farm area and check the turnover ratio. The turnover ratio is effectively how many homes are selling every year within this neighborhood with Title Toolbox, you can look at the turnover ratio.
You can see what the average or the median home price is. So, that way you can back into your numbers and make sure that you have chosen a good neighborhood. That's selling enough homes every single year. That's worth your time and worth your money. What I've learned is that you should have a turnover ratio above 7%.
Now, if you have a good turnover ratio above 7% and you have a good median home price you can quickly figure out how much money you're gonna make off of one deal, and you can effectively figure out how much money you want to spend on your farming campaign throughout the year. So, go ahead and check that out in Title Toolbox. That's step one.
Step two, what I recommend is just checking out if you have any real competition within your neighborhood. You do this by logging into the MLS and go ahead and go to the mapping feature within the MLS and draw your farm out and then click "Search" and search for any homes that have sold within the last one, two, three years, and see if there is a listing agent, when you sort it by listing agent, that is dominating your farm area. In my opinion, if you have a listing agent that has more than 25% market share within that neighborhood, it's probably gonna be pretty hard to break into. So, make sure you check your competition to see who you're up against.
Next step, step three, you've chosen your farm area. Now, you may wanna whittle it down. Maybe you got too many people. You wanna figure out how many homes do you want to hit. Is it 300, 400, 500? Is it less? You can use Title Toolbox and start filtering in on specifics of the farm area. Maybe you want to filter out anyone who has purchased a home within the last two years, three years.
Go ahead and do that and see what count of numbers you are now working with. Another great tool that you have in Title Toolbox is what's called the "Next Seller's" category, and what that does is it's effectively gonna tell you what Title Toolbox believes are the homes that are most likely going to sell within the next 12 months within your specific farm area.
This is especially effective and helpful for Realtors who have maybe a listing, and they're trying to circle prospect around their listing and focus on certain homes. With this tool, you can be selective and pick the homes that are most likely to sell. So, definitely check this feature out. It's completely free to use and download as well through Title Toolbox. Next up, now, you've got your farm list.
Maybe you're ready to send your direct mail campaign. Great, but let's take it a step further. You want to hit as many channels as possible. You've got maybe in person, maybe you're doing door knocking, maybe you're doing open houses. Maybe you're sending them direct mail, which by the way I recommend sending at least once per month to be effective because you're gonna do this and you're gonna commit to it.
Now, in addition to that, if you also wanna reach them on social media, such as Facebook and Instagram, I can teach you how to set up Facebook and Instagram ads, so now that your farm area is also seeing you on social media. You can do this in Title Toolbox by also downloading the email addresses and phone numbers.
When you have access to the email addresses and phone numbers, you can then download a special list that is specifically created and formatted for Facebook, so that you can run and upload it and target ads to your farm list. This is now very effective because people are seeing you on Facebook. They're seeing you on Instagram. They're seeing you via direct mail. They're hopefully seeing you in person. And now, you've got all these different channels covered, where you're reaching them in more locations.
Now, lastly, let's talk about email. You just bought the phones and the emails. Those are 12 cents a record. You can now also do outreach via phone, via email. Take it as far as you want. I'm all about the opinion of you want to be on as many channels as possible. So, leverage Title Toolbox, leverage these resources.
Reach out to me. I'd love to chat with you more about other ways you can be effective with your farming. If you'd like ideas on what I have found to be the most efficient and effective direct mail pieces that have the best calls to action on your direct mail pieces, then contact me.
I'd love to sit down with you and chat more about ways to grow your real estate business.