Whether you are starting up a new real estate agency or looking for ways to boost sales in an established one, real estate niche marketing is the most cost effective and powerful way to develop and expand your business. As any industry matures, niches develop and the property sector is no exception.
Real estate niches in your market
The most obvious type of niche in real estate has always been there, and that is location. As populations become denser in areas such as cities, smaller location niches become economically viable. Where an estate agent may once have sold to a whole city, new agents sprang up exclusively selling properties within each district of that city. Each of these specialist agents is able to claim a unique insight into their locale and offer unique selling points based on that knowledge.
But location is just one type of niche. For example agents may specialise in a particular type of property such as castles and become more likely to sell to the castle-interested market than the local agent because they have a more extensive portfolio of castles and again, can claim unique insight and expertise about castles which becomes a reason why they attract prospective castle buyers.
Another way to carve a niche in the real estate market is by appealing to a particular demographic of property buyer. For example, first time buyers, holiday home buyers, property investors, second home buyers and really there is no end to the way this demographic niching can be exploited. There are agents specialising in anything from recently divorced buyers to downsizing couples whose children have become adults. And with every type of niche, the expertise that follows the specialism leads to unique selling points for the agents.
One of the most obvious demographic in real estate niche marketing is language. If you or your colleagues speak a foreign language, then a niche focused at that language is an obvious choice. And of course there are niches within niches, as you mix and match. For example in the holiday property industry in Spain, there are very successful agents who focus on selling holiday homes to German speakers, or there are agents who deal almost exclusively with British buyers in rural France. Some of these niches, are then large enough to be sliced even further, so we may find an agent in Portugal selling homes in the Algarve to the British retiree market. Multilingual websites open the doors to a whole raft of new niches for you to exploit
Real estate niche marketing makes a lot of sense and provides a better return on your marketing buck. If you have a very specific market that you are appealing to, then your marketing expenditure becomes more focused and your competition is reduced. It is cheaper to advertise in a local newspaper than a national one, for example.
Real estate niche marketing lowers marketing costs
As the real estate industry, along with everything else, becomes ever more reliant upon the internet to attract prospective purchasers and vendors, identifying and exploiting niches becomes increasingly important. The big property portals have the main search terms covered, and optimising websites to get to the top of the search results on general terms in the property industry is a very expensive game. But find the right real estate niche marketing gap and optimise your site for terms relating to that niche, and you can find yourself beating the big boys in your sector.
It’s exactly the same with pay per click advertising. The longer keywords and search terms are cheaper than the short ones, and its the longer terms that are likely to define your niche. Your competition is lower, so prices are lower and you can afford more adverts focused at your market sector. The closer an advert matches the specific goals of an individual, the more likely to click they are.
Not only does real estate niche marketing cost less in a niche, but your conversion rates from enquiry to sale also improve. Wasting time on buyers that are less clear or decided is more likely for the generalist. The niche agent talks to fewer clients to make the same number of sales. Yet they both have the same number of hours in the day, so it makes a lot more sense to spend that time wisely and make more sales.
Very importantly, as an agent, you do not necessarily need to restrict yourself to a single niche. You can create marketing funnels from a variety of niches, and that means that each of these can be quite specific as long as the cost of launching and maintaining each of them is low enough and justified by the returns.
You are probably thinking that real estate niche marketing is all very well in theory, but how do you actually go about it. You have a niche in mind, or maybe you have five niches you would like market to, but what steps should you take? Where do you start? How do you position yourself to get the best results from each niche?
How to turn real estate niche marketing from theory into practice
Regardless of whether you are planning for a large, well established real estate agent or a new start up, you are going to need the right tools for the job or else you are going to find yourself spending much more time and money than you need to.
The first thing you will need is a database and real estate contact management system that has the features and flexibility to manage niche marketing. This system should be able to populate your various niche websites and real estate portals with properties suitable to each niche and deal appropriately with each type of enquiry.
Your real estate system should give you the flexibility to launch new unique sites in niches fast and at low cost, allowing for really dynamic marketing without fear of failure. Real estate websites are the key to this form of marketing as the internet is the main tool used by property buyers. You will also need flexibility in website design without having to hire a team of programmers, and in order to maximise potential visitors, these sites may be based on servers in different countries and advertise different properties that exist on your property portfolio.
Then the system is going to need to give you advanced real estate direct marketing and database mining capabilities, because as time goes on you are going to want to nurture and grow your niche. Referrals are powerful tools in demographic niche marketing and your systems need to be poised to take advantage of that most powerful (and free) method of gaining new business.
If real estate niche marketing is a strategy that you would like to deploy, the multilingual Respacio real estate CRM has been designed for you. The central CRM manages properties and clients and completely customisable to the way you work. Niches in both properties and clients can be identified, and marketing campaigns launched and managed with ease. High levels of automisation cut workload, increasing productivity of teams and individuals. Seamless links to connected WordPress websites ensure complete control over design and content.
To understand how Respacio can help your organisation identify and exploit niches in your market sector, book a demo today and take the first step to converting more leads to sales.
