Secret Weapons for Geographical Farm Marketing

Geographical farming is the act of marketing your real estate business to a neighborhood. This technique has proven to be an effective way for Realtors® to brand themselves as a neighborhood expert, while also providing opportunities to connect systematically with homeowners. But what should you think about when selecting your farm area? What type of property and market data will you deliver to homeowners? And where will you turn for all of their questions? The answer is RPR®. Let me show you…

Do Your Research

It’s important to ensure the geographic farm area meets your criteria before making a selection. Is the neighborhood nearby and easy to get to? Is the number of homes manageable for a consistent marketing outreach? What are the current sales trends? Does the area have an acceptable turnover rate? Does one agent currently dominate sales activity for the neighborhood or have homes been sold by many different agents? The wrong answer to any of these questions could affect the overall successfulness of your efforts.

Saving a geographic area in RPR

To look closer at homes and metrics within a geographical farm area, start by saving the precise geographic boundaries of your farm. Then when you want to pull sales activity and metrics like turnover, year-to-date sales or even year-to-year comparisons, running the numbers will be quick.

Using the RPR website, begin by searching the neighborhood or zip code of your farm. From the search results, navigate to “Map View” and zoom into your farm area. Use the polygon map tool and draw the boundaries for your farm. Once you’ve connected the last point, choose “save” and enter a name for your farm. Once complete, the search boundary has been saved and can be accessed later.

Running the numbers

Now begin to collect the key metrics of your farm area. Type the name of your saved farm area directly into “All Properties” search box. Expand the advanced search by entering Jan. 1, 2015, through the current date in the “Sold Date” fields. Also, uncheck “Active” and “Pending” and then click search to generate a count, representing the number of farm sales in your area within the selected date range.

For a period-to-period comparison, adjust the “Sold Date” field and compare the YTD sales with the same dates from the previous year. You can also take the total number of homes in your farm area and divide that by the number of solds in year to determine the turnover rate.

Continue experimenting with the faceted search found below the map. Are you interested in monitoring pre-foreclosures? If so, from the same search results page uncheck “Non-distressed” and check “distressed.” Also make sure the “Sold Date” field has been updated to “Anytime.”  Click “Apply” and the result will show “Distressed” homes in your farm area. By clicking into each property you can look closer at the distressed actions.

Regular Market Updates

Providing regular and timely market updates to your geographic farm can help build your credibility. For this purpose, RPR has remarkable digital reporting tools such as the Market Activity, Neighborhood, and Property Reports.

TIP: To optimize delivery, work on getting the email address of your local residents. One way is to create a postcard highlighting the reports you offer, then direct people online to your website where they sign up for these monthly email updates.

Answers On-The-Go

Being seen by the homeowners in your farm area is important as well. Many agents will walk their farm, looking for the opportunity to connect with homeowners. Make sure to have RPR Mobile™ installed on your phone for these instances. The mobile app will provide answers to homeowners questions while you are on-location.

For example, RPR Mobile™ can quickly reveal the owner’s name and status, property details, estimated value, mortgage history, and local school scores. The list goes on and on.

Tip: Impress prospective clients with answers on the go. Prior to walking your farm area, generate and save an RPR Market Activity Report. Then when you strike up a conversation with a homeowner, and want to share recent neighborhood sales activity, you can instantly email or text the report to the homeowner without skipping a beat. This is a great way to show your technical know-how, which is likely to impress your prospect.

Quick Access to Property Notes

As you connect with homeowners and learn more about each home in your farm area, having a good place to put these notes is very? helpful. Use the RPR Mobile™ note taking feature to store text, photo and audio notes with any property. These notes are accessible only by you, and can be easily included on RPR generated reports.

For further personalization, add photos from your phone to the cover page of reports.

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25 Comments

  1. Jim Somers June 18, 2015 at 11:26 am - Reply

    I’ve been doing this for years, long before RPR was a gleam in anyone’s eye.

    • M.R. Peevy June 23, 2015 at 12:09 pm - Reply

      Great toolset. I also love the integration with mobile devices. One feature request I have is if RPR had a direct way to pull the owner/property data to make mailing labels. If we could select our area to farm, download the file with their information, and then begin marketing to our farm all through RPR website or Mobile, then that would be fantastic!

      • John Carroll June 23, 2015 at 2:33 pm - Reply

        Another great tool for that is Property Radar, you can do it all yourself very quickly.

        • Tom Sparks June 24, 2015 at 12:06 pm - Reply

          Rates are $39-59 a month

        • Aleshia Sandel June 25, 2015 at 3:49 am - Reply

          Property Radar does not work for Texas…

  2. Julie June 23, 2015 at 5:06 am - Reply

    Very helpful info. for those of us that are new to this business. Thanks!

  3. boris June 23, 2015 at 8:15 am - Reply

    Good stuff. Please keep this type of article coming. Devil is in the details

  4. Ashok Patel June 23, 2015 at 10:58 am - Reply

    Excellent info

  5. JuanCarlos June 23, 2015 at 1:14 pm - Reply

    Finally, the secrets are being revealed. Great!

  6. Michelle London June 23, 2015 at 5:32 pm - Reply

    You CAN print out labels with Realist Tax. Simply enter the street and PRESTO! – select the button below the listing of homeowners that says “Print Labels.” Easy!

    • Aleshia Sandel June 25, 2015 at 3:44 am - Reply

      Thanks Michelle for the info on Realist! I am beginning to look into geographical farming to add to my current marketing efforts. This would be very helpful to me!

  7. David Valuet June 24, 2015 at 6:12 pm - Reply

    So I give this a try and first problem I run into is with defining map. The area of the screen devoted to the map is too small and the 3 large header lines above the map take up too much screen space and won’t scroll out of the way. So I choose polygon tool, click 1st point, then need to scroll the map to be able to click on 2nd point. There are no scroll bars on map Only way to scroll map is to click & drag. Clicking on map to scroll defines a boundry point I didn’t want. No way to delete the unwanted point. By time I was done defining my farm I had 5 or 6 extra, unwanted boundry points.

    • janice Z June 26, 2015 at 9:21 am - Reply

      Sounds good if it actually works. It would be great if the Market Reports could be automatically sent each month or quarter to clients. Was told it cannot. Who wants to send it out individually to all your clients when other programs out there can make it much easier for growing out business.

  8. Dennis June 25, 2015 at 3:38 am - Reply

    This type of information is great…please send more value adds for our clients

  9. gordon corsie July 7, 2015 at 12:02 pm - Reply

    How a bout a way to search a geographic area which showing our sold listings within that area?

  10. Scott Hack July 7, 2015 at 6:03 pm - Reply

    How about a video screen cast showing this process?

  11. maria February 26, 2016 at 6:56 pm - Reply

    what is a good number for turnover rate?

  12. Rob Johnston November 26, 2016 at 4:47 pm - Reply

    Has the option for “sold date” been removed? The only option available for me is “Listed within” and the options are any, new, listed within days (7,30,60,90 and more than 90).

    • Reggie Nicolay November 28, 2016 at 11:09 am - Reply

      Hi Rob, make sure that you are using the “all properties” search. Then click “Advanced Search” and you will see the sold date filter. Either choose a data range from the pull down or select a data range.

  13. Mandi Wetter May 2, 2017 at 8:07 pm - Reply

    Hello, does anyone know a way to obtain people’s phone numbers in the neighborhoods you are geographically farming? Is there a program or site you can access that gives this information to agents?

    Thanks!

  14. Marjorie Chagas July 14, 2017 at 5:41 am - Reply

    I love using RPR. But there is a need for improvement. Please take a hard look at the features that your rival competitors are providing, such as printing out labels. Also, The live basic training provided is not enough at our local Realtor Association, and the video training is not enough we need be able to ask questions, etc. Also adding the phone numbers will be great on a budget of the realtor that just staring. Make it happen!

    • Reggie Nicolay July 14, 2017 at 6:29 am - Reply

      Hi Marjorie, all great feedback. Thank you. I will pass along.

  15. roderick smith February 5, 2019 at 9:11 pm - Reply

    How can i get the phone numbers of owners in my target area to contact if I’m not able to walk the neighborhood?

  16. […] Connect with the homeowners and be ready with the RPR Neighborhood Activity Report. […]

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