Community Focused Marketing | How to be a community leader.

Marketing Real Estate (or anything) is usually less about the product you're selling, than about the solution that you can provide and being known as the go to person for that solution.

In Real Estate it's more about the community... than solely about the house.

In our experience, being known as the "go to guy" for information about the community (including, but not limited to what homes are for sale in it) has proven to give the most long term results.

It's not an instant thing, it's cumulative. Over time, being the person that has the best information and provides the best place to get to know and interact with the community has caused a reversal in the traditional marketing role. Instead of hunting for new clients that are looking to sell or buy their new home, we focus on providing the best information about the community and instead those buyers and sellers start to come to you.

It's a subtle difference but very dramatic when the funnel starts to work for you.

Now... Real Estate Agents know this for the most part and the better ones provide some info on their sites about the community. But a 1 to 3 page review of local schools, recent sales and population density is not really what I'm talking about (although a good start to the whole process)

I mean a true hub for the community. Somewhere that people can interact with each other in forums, create blogs about their neighborhood, comment on restaurants, listings and each others posts ...

We've outlined the concept in this presentation:
http://docs.google.com/Present?docid=dfzrfpvh_455d4mfgdd8&skipauth=true

Have a look at some of the screencasts available on this post if you're interested in more details on how we've achieved this with custom software that we've created for the task: http://strataxl.com/blogs/business-development/2008/8/06/introducing-the...

This software (and a vast network of community sites) was created for a Vancouver Realtor who has been very successful in becoming the acknowledged community leader selling over 90% of the homes in his main "farm" area (most often double ending the deals ensuring that he's making more money even now with less volume being sold).
http://strataxl.com/blogs/business-development/2008/7/26/agentxl-case-st...

This is not a press go and forget about it type of solution, it requires work and creativity so it's really only going to appeal to a small percentage of agents that are open to creating an alternative marketing funnel that brings them traffic and leads rather than simply buying ads in the local paper and waiting for the phone to ring.

The payoff however is massive, instead of PPC or traditional advertising that requires ongoing investment, you get to leverage your work and the work of others in your community and it pays dividends for years after with marginal ongoing effort.

We're looking for some progressive agents that are interested in taking the concept of blogging to the next level by launching their own community sites on our technology.

If you're interested in being one of our "early adopters" and benefiting from the same technology specifically designed for the task of positioning Agents as community leaders using "Real Estate Marketing 2.0" techniques, I invite you to view the video and sign up at http://YourFarmer.com

We will only be selecting 1 person from each area (sorry if you're in Vancouver, it's already spoken for) and are going to limit the number of agents that we work with to ensure that we can give them attention needed to successfully launch their community sites.

I look forward to your feedback.