Good Farming Starts with Good Seeds, in Forestry, Real Estate, and Life
It all starts with a seed, or a portfolio of seeds.
I grew up on a farm where we learned to plant good seeds, since then I have spent most of my career growing trees, and now I find that good seeds, well planted and nurtured, produce results in real estate as well.
Though we do a variety of things to farm our neighborhoods including unique Facebook pages, localism blogging and SOI networking; we also have a unique seed that we have planted in many parts of our city.
Ten years ago, I started buying up these seeds during the last real estate crash, many of them were foreclosures back then.
After nearly a decade of fixing these homes, renting them and caring for them, our market is finally hot, and it is time to part with them.
Part with them yes, but not so fast, they make great bait for those who are fishing for both buyer and seller clients, just takes a good fisherman and his crew.
When I started selling real estate it was nice to have a large portfolio of homes ready to list and knowing that they make good bait as well as having good rental income coming from them allowed me to be a very picky seller, only accepting qualified buyers and exceptional offers.
These bait homes allow us to keep up a strong presence in the neighborhoods with plenty of signs, plenty of listings all over the internet, dozens of Facebook posts and blog posts, and plenty of opportunities for neighborhood campaigns.
My buyers’ specialist has used these homes to gain most of her buyers, some come from sign calls, some come from open houses, many come from Facebook and Active Rain inquiries.
Open houses are a unique opportunity, especially when you have a cooperative seller, myself, who is willing to allow my agents to use these opens as a temporary showroom, complete with a table filled with posters from our other listings along with a sign that says to leave their name, phone number, and email to get the latest info on these homes and any others in town as they come on the market.
People are anxious to sign up for our listing cart that gives them the latest news on all listings in their buying cart.
Open houses are also a great opportunity to canvas the neighborhood, dropping off invitation cards, all with the suggestion that they can help us to pick the new owners for this home by inviting their friends and relatives to the open house.
Many will give us the names of a few good candidates right away, others will show up at the open house with them.
And others will be so impressed with our marketing approach that they will suggest others in the area who are thinking about selling.
Though we have been able to be choosy about the offers we accept, we have still sold quite a few of these homes and will likely sell all of them. But before that time I suspect that my agents and I will collect plenty of buyers and sellers from these seeds.
Planting seeds works, both in farming, forestry, and in Real Estate.
This encore blog post was written as a submission to the ActiveRain Challenge - My Best Farming Technique (Sponsored by SmartZip). June 2018 https://activerain.com/blogsview/5236899/good-farming-starts-with-good-seeds
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