Commercial and residential real estate agents can use demographics to make their marketing more effective. Demographics can help agents understand their local market better and point them in the right direction in their marketing efforts. With the variety of real estate demographic information that’s available, smart agents are using demographic data to generate leads, get listings, find areas ripe for a retail client’s new location, identify potential sellers, and close more sales.
Finding Motivated Sellers
For many agents, finding motivated buyers is much easier than finding property owners that are ready to sell. For one thing, a real estate website with a property search automatically attracts buyers. And, most agents post their listings on a variety of online listing websites. Since a large portion of commercial and residential buyers use the internet to find listings, it’s possible to generate a flow of buyer prospects.
The larger problem is finding property owners who are motivated to sell. In residential real estate, agents can obtain important demographic information from the National Organization of Realtors™ (NAR). For example, the annual Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers provide demographics such as average age, income, and number of years a seller lived in their home.
You can use that demographic data to search lists of property owners in your farm area that meet those criteria. In addition, you can use a property owner database that has even more sophisticated predictive analysis capabilities.
For commercial sellers, you can use a different set of criteria. For example, a business that is growing or has merged with a competitor would be a good prospect. And, if the business has been closed, there’s a good likelihood that the owner will decide to sell. You can also consider things such as floods that may prompt an owner to sell a property they can’t or don’t want to rebuild.
Identifying the demographics you want to target is sometimes the easiest task. After that, you need a database that tracks all of the information you’re targeting. Only then can you identify owners based on those criteria to compile a targeted list. ProspectNow offers both commercial and residential databases where you can search on a number of criteria and use predictive analytics to find your prospects.
Once you have a list of potential sellers in your area, you can start a marketing campaign that you target to those property owners. For example, if you’re creating a direct mail piece, it should speak to a 55-plus audience. You should use images of mature parents with older children, not a young couple with a toddler. It’s an easy way to help control marketing costs because you know that you’re spending time and money to reach the right people.
Researching a Farm or Service Area
Demographics are also helpful if you’re moving to a new area or choosing a new farm area. You need to know what businesses and individuals are located in that area. You also need to know about any changes that the area is experiencing. With the right demographics, you can answer the following types of questions:
· Is the population in the area increasing or decreasing?
· Are most homes in the area buyer-owned or rented?
· What is the average age of the residents of the area?
· What are the local taxes?
· What is the average home price?
· What is the average income?
· How many commercial businesses serve the area?
· How many retail outlets serve the area?
· Is employment increasing or decreasing?
· Does demand exceed supply for needed services?
For a residential agent, this type of information will help them determine how to sell to the residents in the farm area. If you’re choosing a new residential farm, you’d want to know if one agent is dominating the market. You can check your local MLS listings to discover which agents have sold in the area.
In another example, a commercial agent can determine whether a geographic area is expanding or contracting. That information would have a big impact on how successful the agent would be if they targeted the area.
Finding the Right Opportunities for Investors
Both residential and commercial real estate agents work with investors. The difference is usually a matter of company size. On the residential side, many agents work with small investors who purchase one single-family residence at a time for rental income. Commercial agents typically work with larger businesses that want to invest in multi-family, retail, office, or industrial properties.
For a residential agent working with a residential investor, it’s not enough to know all about a home for sale. They also need to know about the community. For example, they need to know how many rental homes exist, the average monthly rental, nearby amenities, and the turnover. They need to determine if there are things in the area that would attract renters such as a university or military installation.
A commercial agent needs a great deal of information to determine whether to recommend an investment to a client. If a commercial client is looking for a location for a new grocery store, the agent needs to know about the competition, the traffic in specific locations, cost of capital, whether population is increasing or decreasing, how easy it would be to hire employees and what the average salary might be, among other things.
Demographics would also play a big part in a commercial agent’s efforts to determine how well a particular investment would fit into a client’s portfolio and when assets aren’t going to continue to add value to a portfolio.
A successful real estate agent will use demographics as a competitive advantage. There are many places to obtain demographic data, but gathering, tracking and analyzing that data can be extremely time consuming. The difficulty of obtaining usable information is one reason why many agents don’t bother using demographics to the fullest.
That’s where ProspectNow can help agents of all types stand out from the crowd. For commercial real estate agents, ProspectNow offers a databases of 40 million properties, 14 million businesses and companies and 15 million LLCs and corporations. On the residential side, local, metro and national databases offer predictive analytics, owner contact information, and filtering by dozens of criteria. You can get more clients and close more deals by starting your free trial.