Real Estate Farming: How to Become the Go-to Agent in Your Neighborhood in 2022

The success of your real estate farming operation depends on choosing the right area. A good farm is 500 homes or less. Choose a place where there’s healthy demand (a good absorption rate) and where homes are being listed for sale at a solid clip (a good turnover rate). Ideally, choose a place where you’ve got some name recognition and some built-in expertise.

In our Ultimate Real Estate Farming Strategy Guide, we’ve got all the tools you need to choose the right farm area. We’ll show you how to calculate absorption and turnover rates, and give you tips on conducting geographic, demographic, and property research.

Agents crushing the real estate farming game are delivering consistent value to homeowners in their farm areas. The key to this step is to plan the “what,” “when,” and “how” in advance. That way, you can reserve your precious face-time for client conversations that will move your prospects closer to a transaction.

Examples of successful real estate farming outreach include postcards, market updates, social media groups, and neighborhood websites. Create a calendar with each message you’re planning to send, and note what value it will provide to your audience. How does it contribute to your overall goals? Use our content calendar planning page in our Strategy Guide to help you map out your outreach.

If you don’t know where to get started with the neighborhood website, we suggest Parkbench. With a Parkbench website, you can create an online space where community members can get information about local events, news, neighborhood happenings, and of course, real estate—all brought to them by you, their go-to resource.

Your real estate farming leads are distinct from the types of leads you get from Zillow Premier Agent or the home valuation landing page on your website. The contacts you make in your farm area result from your consistent effort to build relationships with people in your area. Those efforts are tied to the budget and time you allocate to farming.

To save you time, opt for a solid real estate customer relationship manager (CRM) that helps you tag farm contacts, automate digital communication like email or text messages, and create a record of the value you’ve delivered over the life of your farm. Plus, a CRM provides an easy system to track every reply and ensure you promptly follow up on every point of contact.

Our choice for the best real estate CRM for 2022 is LionDesk, but you can check out all our top picks in our guide: The Best Real Estate CRM for 2022: In-depth Reviews & Pricing.

You’ve done all the prep work, and now it’s time to execute. You’ve chosen the right farm area, made a plan to deliver consistent, long-term value, and set up a system to help you manage and track your interactions.

Now, it’s time to set your automated communication plans in motion and start the clock on the high-touch outreach you’ll do to follow up with your postcards, social posts, and market updates.

Successful real estate farming is a combination of long-term automated communication and smart, day-by-day, personal follow-up. If you treat farming as a set-it-and-forget-it strategy, you won’t be as effective. Be active in the communities you’re serving, and your clients (and your wallet!) will thank you!

Details: The backbone of your farming campaign is your real estate farming postcards and flyers. These are ideal tools to convey messages, statistics, and authority to your farm area.

Use them to deliver a quarterly snapshot of the market, recipes, or sports schedules—ANYTHING that will provide value to your recipients.

Details: If you think about your regularly scheduled postcards as a dependable, professional handshake, the on-demand postcards you send out when there’s market activity in your farm area is the unexpected high-five.

Make homeowners aware of market activity in their community, especially after a property sells. Look for spikes in your home valuation landing pages on your real estate website after these postcards go out.

Sending about 50 postcards to homes that are similar to active listings and sales in your area is a wake-up call to homeowners. You’ll be providing them with valuable information and insight into what their financial opportunity could be if they decide to sell, as well.

Details: Your farm area should have a dedicated section on your website where you can post weekly updates about the micro-neighborhood market, goings-on in the neighborhood, and even events of interest to community members in and around town. Your content can be short and sweet, with five or six sentences and a picture.

Your website serves two purposes: to act as an online hub for your neighborhood to stop by and see what’s going on, and to show potential buyers interested in purchasing in your chosen area that you’re the go-to expert when they are ready to buy.

(Source: Page shown is from a Placester website template)

Details: The real estate letter is an ideal way share market deep-dives since you have more space for in-depth thought and analysis. Talk about what’s going on in your business or give shoutouts to those doing good works in the community.

Share messages that communicate to your farm that you’re the expert when it comes to buying and selling homes and LIVING in your community.

We’ve pulled together 17 real estate prospecting letter templates as a helpful resource for your prospecting venture. Check it out and start upping your prospecting game today.

Pro tip: Farming a high-end neighborhood? Consider handwriting those letters. Yes, it will be time-consuming, but the personal touch provided will pay off in spades with discerning sellers.

Details: Collecting and communicating information that your farming community wants to know about is the best way to use a neighborhood-specific website. Detail local events and include interviews with local business owners, local news, coupons, and, of course, all the latest information about the real estate market.

Some people won’t visit your personal website because they perceive it to be about you, but a website focused on their neighborhood is about them, making it more palatable. As mentioned earlier, our suggestion for this sort of platform is Parkbench.

Power-users of Parkbench are posting weekly content (if not more often). However, posting once or twice a month is a great first effort for agents just getting started on the platform.

Get Started With Parkbench

Details: Your farming efforts will be significantly more effective if you’re intentional about getting face-to-face with the people in your farm. Door-knocking isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but remember, you’re not going into these walks around the neighborhood cold.

By the time you kick off your door-knocking weekend, neighborhood residents will have heard from you multiple times. They know you, even though they don’t know you yet, and they should be familiar with the value you’ve provided so far.

Door-knocking takes practice, a little bit of courage, and most of all, consistent effort. Don’t call it quits until you get through your entire farm. We promise that the last 50 doors you knock on will be a lot easier than the first 50.

Details: Whether you’re throwing a summer block party and BBQ or a Halloween party, events are a fun way to meet and greet community members. People gravitate to fun events happening within walking distance of their homes.

Events are also fantastic means of building on your authority in your community. Show your community you aren’t active just for business reasons—you’re a part of the happenings that your community connects with every year.

Start with something you know will be a hit if you’re new to event sponsorship, like a free pumpkin giveaway in October. Sponsor a neighborhood garage sale, a community fireworks display in July, or a Christmas tree giveaway in December.