Way back in the olden days, when Mary and I began our real estate careers, a niche was a decorative recess in a wall, and we actually had a couple of those. But no one we ran across was using it in the sense of a specialized segment of the real estate market, and if they had been, we probably wouldn't have paid much attention. That just wasn't how one did real estate in those days, at least around here.
So we began our careers as generalists. We lived in Fort Collins, but Loveland was only 8 miles away back then (it's a lot closer now), and Greeley was just a bit further. In between those three were scattered a variety of smaller satellite communities like Wellington, Berthoud, Windsor, and Johnstown, and, courtesy of my previous economic development work, we had a good grasp on them all. So our market area became northern Colorado - from Wyoming on the north to Berthoud on the south - 60 miles or so - and from the foothills on the west to Greeley on the east - around 70 miles. It's a big market area, containing around 300K people, but the roads are good and no place is more than an hour away unless we're really getting into the mountains (and that's always worth the drive).
As for what we did - we did it all. We were just starting out and not really in a financial position to pick and choose, so during those early years, we represented buyers and sellers on in-town homes in every price range, style and age, had a couple of small builders, did some mountain and horse property, suburban lots, and pretty much anything else that came our way. We worked hard to develop the expertise we needed for each market segment, managed to stay out of trouble, and did a lot of innovative marketing, including a very early internet presence that generated a lot of relocation work. We eventually became busy and successful.
When we first became aware of the concept of niches, it was somewhere around 2009 - not a great time for real estate, and we needed every deal we could find. Any specialized market segment had significantly less activity for us to access, and the idea of focusing down had little appeal.
But around then we did realize that we needed new ideas to expand our reach and generate new business. A fortuitous nudge toward blogging brought us to ActiveRain, where we found what we needed: a strong presence on Google organic search results for long-tailed searches for different market segments and neighborhoods in our three biggest cities. I have written before about how we made this strategy work for us - if you want check it out, here's the link.
We're currently doing 46 long-tail searches on our IDX website, supported by quarterly market reporting on AR, and most of them generate steady Google page 1 results, leads and closed sales. This effort accounts for about 30% of our current business, with our sphere generating about 50% in repeat business and referrals, and the remaining 20% coming from our local marketing and reputation.
But it just doesn't feel right to call 46 widely varied market segments a niche, and we still think of ourselves as competent generalists. It would surely be a lot easier to maintain that competence for a much more limited range of practice, but somehow the idea of easy hasn't offered much competition to the idea of never being bored and having a lot of fun.
And to be clear, we're not taking a contrarian position on the value of niches. I wouldn't recommend trying to build our model for today's market - except for the blogging part - and if we were starting over, we'd be all over the idea of a focused niche. But we were lucky - our concept was right for us, our timing was very fortunate, and we're more than satisfied with how it has turned out. It works for us, and that's all we could ever ask.
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