Here are the essential steps to finding your place and becoming a top real estate agent in your market.
How To Become A Top Real Estate Agent:
1. Identify Who You Are as a Real Estate Agent
Charting a course in in your local real estate market starts with understanding who you are. Marketing 101 is to start with the absolute basics. To find out who you are as a real estate agent it’s essential to understand your strengths, weaknesses, and what your goals are.
Once you have established who you are, you should create a mission and value statement to anchor you.
If you are part of, or starting a real estate team, you will also need to to define the the avobe for each team member. Establishing what what everybody brings to the table will help you meet your goals.
If you are establishing a team, that may grow into a brokerage, this will also help you attract the right kind of agents.
2. Analyze Your Target Real Estate Market
If you analyze the real estate market you are planning to target you will be able to determine what sections are hot, what sections have slowed down, and most importantly, where the opportunities lie. This analysis of your target real estate market will be critical to your sucess. Digging into the MLS and figuring out exactly what the numbers tell you will help you establish your marketing audience.
National and even state-wide level numbers are not relevant to you. Think hyper-local. Macro numbers may have some trickle-down effects; however, what matters to you is what is happening on the street/neighborhood level in your target community.
You should gather data for the following metrics:
- Average days on market for property of different price and type
- Typical listing commission rate
- Average price trend for a market you are interested in participating in
- Number of new listings in a particular sector month over month and this year versus last year
3. Analyze The Local Competition
As with the local real estate market, you must also understand your competition.
Knowing who is doing what and how well they’re doing it will help you identify how you can do it better. Youl should look for niches that are currently going unfulfilled. Similarly, establishing what sectors of the real estate market are overserviced.
Many real estate agents have a tendancy to scramble for any business that comes their way. There are many thousands of agents in some counties with really poor marketing skills. If you look at agents doing 3-12 transactions per year, you will notice their commitment to a marketing campaign similoar to the attention span of a two-year old child. They will jump on trends, you’ll see a couple of posts online, but then they’ll be onto the next — or promoting some weight-loss powdered smoothie mix. Their marketing is inefficient, inconsistent, and ineffective. Great news for you.
How To Become A Top Real Estate Agent In Your Local Market:
Identify The Digital Footprint Of Your Competition
You should create off-brand social media account, and follow all of your competition. Watch them closely and get a feel for what content is being pushed, and to what demographic. This insight will allow you break out these audiences and formulate a consistent multi-pronged strategy aimed at the correct audiences.
At CHEM.agency, we have some incredible tools that we utilize as part of our SEM (search engine marketing) service offerings. We can track all of your competitors and every post they make online, blog or social. We can also see the number of likes, read the comments and interactions, and even the number of people that saw the post and didn’t interract with it. This is really valuable insight into figuring out what content we should be pushing in your market to be effective.
Additionally, you should be identifying your Realtor competitions’ audience on social media. Deterime what demographic are they targeting, then do an MLS search for homes in that range and see which agents are doing the most production. This should enable you to drill down and find your actual competition. The highest producing agents may not have the biggest online presence. Similarly, you might find agents who do a ton of ineffective marketing online, so by browsing you see a lot from that person – although business-wise it’s ineffective.
In conclusion, understanding what the rest of the field is doing you can determine what market, and audience segments are. Once you do that, you can move in and fill that gap.
4. Decide What Real Estate Services You Will Provide
As a Realtor, yes, you provide provide real estate services. However, most real estate agents what servies they provide and they’ll typically stumble.
With every service there should be a set of deliverables. This sets expectations and defines the offering.
Do you work with buyers? Yes. Are you willing to go and tour 100 houses with a buyer that’s looking for a $200k property?
Do you work with sellers? Yes. Are you going to take out a full page ad for every listing?
If you define the services that you offer, and the scope of those services, this will lead to clear expectations, clear deliverables, a process, a plan, happy customers. In turn, you, as a Realtor, will quickly build a successful and focused real estate business.
Think what you (and your team, if applicable) are good at. Consider your passions, and what the market needs. The overlap of these categories should help define your focus.
If you dislike some specific real estate service, you can always hire to build that segment of your business out later on. You will be amazed how much success and process attracts other agents to your team or brokerage.
Many agents, like those I exampled earlier in this segment, that do an okay amount of business in their 3-12 sides. However, they fail to break that glass-ceiling and increase their number of real estate transaction sides because they don’t have a system in place.
5. Identify Who Your Ideal Customers Are
Once you have determined what services you will provide in your defined real estate market, you will have a good profile of who your customers are.
For instance, your average customer will be younger if you have identified a need for a real estate agent that specializes in first time home buyers.
Therefore, your customers will be more apt to communicate via social media, this newspaper advertising is not going to produce ROI for this audience. Furthermore, data tells us that most 18-30 year-old humans use Instagram over Facebook. This tells us that we should be using a modern marketing approach through the right channels to hit the right audience.
On the other hand, for older retirees, USPS and the newspaper are still important channels for this audience. My 90 year-old grandmother is on Facebook, by the way; but not Instagram.
Drill down and really understand all you can about your customers. These buckets (customer personas, as we call them) are very important.
Disecting your audience in several intersecting segements and simulataneously executing several targeted marketing campaigns will infinitly increate your marketing dollars return on investments.
6. Conduct a SWOT Analysis
SWOT—or Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats is an analysis typically seen in business plan templates.
If you’re not familiar, you’ll simply fill out four quadrants with that you know about yourself and your business.
For instance, if you are strong in analytics (strength) but weak in marking cold calls (weakness)? Maybe there is an opportunity for real estate brand (agent,team, brokerage) that is focused on Millenials (opportunity)?
Or, through your penchant for analytics you are aware taht your target real estate market is first time homebuyers and market appreciation is pricing many out of the market (threat)?
Performing a SWOT analysis regularly is a great practice as your skills will likely change, new threats to your business arise all the time. It is something that can brought up at quarterly reviews with your team members to help you plan for training, etc.
7. Determine Your Goals
You should set some goals for your real estate business. These could be any metrics: financial, growth, or otherwise. The research and analysis you have completed should give you insight to enable you to set some tough, and achievable goals are.
Goals you should set for your real estate business include:
- Gross commission income (GCI)
- Transaction Sides
- Number of leads
- Hiring a Real Estate ISA (SWAT says cold-calling is a weakness of yours)
- Adding new agents to your team
- Time Management
