KGCI: Real Estate on Air - Is Geographical Farming Dead with Ryan Smith

Episode Date: October 7, 2024

Welcome to the Real Estate Fight Club, a podcast for agents where you'll witness a battle of opinions about topics affecting your real estate business. There are many ways for agents to achieve success. The secret is to find which approach will work for you. Now, always in your corner. Here are your hosts, Jen Mertland and Monica Weekly. I'm excited for today's guest, Monica. I actually am too. This is something you and I have not talked about in 180 episodes, well, until the 180th episode, like in any detail. Right.

So I'm really psyched, and I'll let you introduce Ryan here in a second. But we want to thank everybody for joining us again and tuning in, listening, and subscribing and following us on all of the platforms except for Twitter. We're not on. Right? Let's focus on our strengths. Instagram, YouTube, Facebook. Everything else, but maybe we'll take over Twitter land at some point. I don't know. Unlikely. All right, guys, today, Jen and I and Ryan are going to duke it out. Mostly Ryan and I against Jen are going to duke it out over this question.

Is geographical farming dead? And for those of you who have not heard of the term farming, Jen, before you introduce Ryan, why don't you kind of like give a little context there? Well, Ryan's going to beat me up already, though. Because what people do is they take their neighborhood or a place they want to farm. They have no data about the neighborhood. They don't know the attrition rate. They don't know anything about it. And they send a letter maybe once or maybe twice.

And then like that's it. And they think that, oh, I should get business because I live in this neighborhood. Is that Brian? That's how it goes, right? Yep. That's, I would say failed farming goes that way. Good farming goes another way. That way. That's awesome. All right. Well, Jen, take a second to introduce our guest. I'm so excited that Ryan's here.

Yeah, so this is Ryan Smith. He has a program called Launch Your Farm. It's also a podcast. And he's going to teach us the modern 2.0 way to have a successful geographic farm because doing it, mailing a letter, maybe even one letter a month. It's just not enough, right, Ryan? Or tell us how, give us some pointers. Sure. So I think like you mentioned, when you think about geographic, you have to reframe how you see geographic farming to understand is it dead or not. And most agents, when they hear farming, they think of that traditional old school farming and it's very old school and that they, when you hear it, you think of you send out postcards, you just go out and door knock the neighborhood and you just find an area and just send enough stuff and people want to do business with you. And the mistake that agents make is that they make it about themselves. And that's traditional ways. Pause there, Ryan. That is like the mistake in any marketing, right? It's not just like the farm. It's like, look at me, look what I did. Look how many houses I sold.

And it's really only like two houses. Let's be honest. But it's like I'm so successful. Let's face that. It's not just real estate. It's all relationships. Wow. I'm saying that's another podcast for a little.

All right. Go on, Ryan. So yeah, so the shift has to be changed from chest beating to community-based. And I've talked to thousands of agents. and agents have kind of mean say, I've tried farming, I've done this, and I usually ask, and I find out, it's usually one of a few reasons why. And the first is, it's usually, I send out something about myself, or how great I am, or they just talk about real estate specifically, where it's just real estate stats and real estate information. And the reality is the community

doesn't care about you. And they don't care about stats until they know that you care about them. So one of the things that I kind of coined in my, kind of my basis of what I think farming is is called CPR, and that's community positioning and relationships. And at any good fundamental farm has those things, whether the agents know that's what they're doing or not. And you have to have the community focus first. And that's really the starting point. And this is where agents don't do that. And they don't start with that. And they start with, again, themselves or real estate. When you put the community first and you put the community ahead of the transaction, it completely changes how you do things and why you do things and the things

you can actually do in your community. Because you're saying, hey, I'm going to serve the community. I'm going to put them ahead of my needs. I'm going to put them ahead of the transaction. now you create a lot more opportunities. And you can you give some examples of how we would do that? And even before you do that, how do you pick where you're going to geographically farm? Because it has to be a place where people are moving in and out, right? It can't be a place where people live there forever

and houses never go on the market. So that I could literally take a whole session just on choosing a farm. There's a lot of factors, and that's another thing that's going back to old school. Old school tells you find something that has a good turnover, rate and just focus on that area. And the reality is that's one metric and not the only metric or the most important metric. It's something that has been taught traditionally and that's what people have been passed on. And you hear that from, I hear it all the time. I go to training and people

say that's what you do. And I say the example of that is like saying, check my blood pressure is like checking my health. That's a metric of my health, but it's not the overall approach. So there's a lot of things you want to consider. Price points, competition, styles of homes, your connections, locations, the trends that are happening, is this becoming a better neighborhood, a worse neighborhood? Is there things happening? Do you have connections as far as local businesses? So there's a lot of factors when you choose a farm. And the great thing is there's no right or wrong farm. There's no right for me. I'm sorry, there's a farm that could be right for me, but may not be right for you. So there's a lot of factors you're going to have to decide when you're choosing it. This is where

most agents get hung up on is in that selection process. And then I see most agents. Exactly. They get stuck on that and go, I don't know what to do or they just pick something because they live in area. And that can be a factor, but it may not be the only factor. So choosing the right farm can make a difference. And then it's really understanding who's in the community and how you're going to serve them. That comes to the P part, which is the positioning part, which is there's kind of two elements of positioning, which is positioning yourself as an expert and as an ambassador. And when you shipped that way, again, it helped you reframe what you do in your farm and how you do it. Because when you learn to position yourself as an ambassador, you then look for opportunities to help out the community that

you're serving and say, hey, I'm the champion for you. I'm going to help you guys. I'm going to fight for the little guy and I'm here to help make it better. And then you can also position yourself as that expert. And it doesn't mean you have to be doing more sales or no more about real estate. You can know about all the local businesses, about the hotspots, about the schools, about the things that are happening in the community. And you can become an expert and say, hey, you know, this is what I know. This is what I'm specializing in. And you can use that to create your strategies and to create opportunities for you in the community. But you have to think differently than that old school.

Talk to me about the word ambassador and how that shows up in a postcard or a mailing or a series of those. Sure. So one way, and again, people ask me about farming and say, should I just send out postcards? That's a strategy. It's not the strategy for farming.

If you're going to use something like that is tie that to things that are happening in the community. So an example, in our farm, we had a community event that was going on. We were doing a fundraiser. there was a kid that was selling him and his dad would build birdhouses and they would take all the money from the birdhouses and donate it to the hospital. At the time when we met them, I think they were at like $15,000 or $17,000 they had raised. I loved what they were doing. They lived in the

farm and I'm like, this is amazing. This is a great opportunity. So then I was like, this is a no-brainer to help them, which then helps me become the ambassador for the community and them. So then what we did was we held a fundraising event. And after all, a sudden done, I think we helped them raise about $8,000 between my own connections. But what we did was, yeah, it was a great opportunity. And what we did was we tied that to our marketing. So we said, hey, you know what, we'll sponsor the event and we'll go out and let our community know. We did a postcard. One side was real estate related and the other side was the event. And then we used our connections in the community. We used our connections with the media. And we made a kind of more holistic approach.

It's like birds need houses too. Exactly. It just, it worked well. So we used postcards to tie us to the community and a cause at the same time rather than just saying a postcard saying, how much is your home worth? I like what you're saying too about like it was somebody that was in the farm, right? So like that could be a great way to start it. Because I know like, I would get for me, I'd get stuck and like, well, what do I say other than like here's the market stats? Like, how do you get to know people? But it could be like, where do you volunteer? What are you involved in the community? And like, that's the conversation starters with the people in your farm. and then as you're having those conversations,

looking for connections. Exactly. And something like my partner, she did, we just moved to a new area, and so she's starting a farm down here, and we did a community garage sale. So again, it's helping the community. Those are the worst to organize, Ryan.

She enjoys it, but it worked out well. And so her first try, she actually stopped because she was getting too many people responding, and she's like, this is, I don't know how many we should have. I don't even know if we're going to have enough people. It was her first time doing it, but she tied in offline marketing and online marketing.

She did flyers. she did postcard, she went in door knock. And now she's known as the garage sale person, and people are recognizing her when she does her other things. And all she has to say is, oh, I organize the community garage sale. That's positioning her as that champion for the community. People really like that. You said the words she's now known as the garage sale lady.

Isn't that ultimately the first step is to worry about being known first before you try to sell? Yeah. It's the relationships. and that's the final part of the CPR is the relationship side of it. My view is the ultimate goal is to build relationships with people. So before you sell, before you push, it's you move through that,

you find the community, you position yourself, and then you build relationships. And I've always said, I'd rather have five years to build a relationship with someone than five weeks. If you're doing old school farming, you're trying to connect with people

or if you're doing old school sales, where you're just cold calling. You literally have like a small window to try to build a relationship. If I'm connecting, with people, building relationships, adding value to people, getting my name out there in a different way, you're going to have a much higher chance of converting a lead because no one can compete with you when they've been connecting with you. They've been getting your newsletter. They've been

chatting with you for however many times. That becomes so much easier. Yeah. Right. Yeah. What are some other ways you can do that on your way to being the real estate expert? What are some ways you've seen that are simple, maybe less expensive than others as far as being in a neighborhood? So I think it starts with a mind shift change around what you're doing. And this is where, again, going back to the old school, being dead, most traditional farming was getting your name out there. And my approach has always been, how do I get people's names into me? How do I get people to put their hand up?

How do I get their information? How do I get their phone numbers and their email addresses and the relationships? And that, everything I do then is going, how do I get more people to put their hand up? How do I get more connections with people? And this is where if you just send out a bunch of postcards to nameless people, you're hoping, it's like a shot in the dark that they will say, hey, I'm remembering Ryan and I'm going to work with him. So to answer your question is, I would shift to how do I do things that are going to get people to put their hand up. So one of the things we did in our neighborhood

was, we did a neighborhood at home prices report. It was like a monthly report and a newsletter that went out. It was a hard copy report that got sent out. It was not cheap because it was, we were printing it each month and setting it out. But that turned into crazy business. So we started our farm in September. We got our first listing in January. January. And from January for the next 15 months, being they're getting 17 transactions. And the core came from that report and getting people to put their hand up and then connecting with them each month. And that really snowballed into us becoming the people who are creating value, showing that we cared, being the expert as, hey, we know what's happened in the community.

We created the community newsletter. And it helped us connect with people well past just the real estate transactions. The thing you did differently than most people, though, is did you guys hear that? He started in September 1st deal in January. Do you know that 99% of all agents would have given up by then? Exactly. In the mail, right? That's the secret sauce, isn't it? It's the commitment to the process.

It's a long-term game. Yeah, I think that's a good spot to take a break. And then when we come back, Ryan, I'd like to hear if you did like a 12-month, if you want to do a 12-month, you know you're going to commit to it. What is the cadence? And let's go walk through an example, I guess. Yeah. Yeah.

Good idea. Welcome back to the battle inside the ring. Let's get back to it. Jen has hives because Ryan's talking about relationships and knowing you. And Jen just wants to, you know, send a bunch of cards and have somebody call her and door knock. I'm just going to door knock them, cold call them. Well, you're so charming that I guess that probably just worked. Yeah, exactly. Ryan and I were not as charming. So we have to take a minute and build it up. All right. Ryan, if I'm listening to you and I'm saying, okay, look, that what you're saying makes sense.

I can buy into that your approach would yield better, quicker results because that makes sense. But I'm a little overwhelmed at how I should be communicating. Okay, I get a monthly report. That makes sense. But what else do I need to be doing? And how often do I need to, like, communicate with these people? How big should the farm be? That's a whole other, that's a whole session too on that.

So I would say, so it starts with really understanding what you want to do and what your goals are. And I always tell people, if you're choosing a farm, it comes down to your budget. And that's, I don't just mean your financial budget. That's your time and your energy budget as well. So how much time are you we're going to put into this? The reality is it takes work, just like a real farm, just like real gardening. I'm a big gardener. I grow a lot of vegetables.

It takes time. And there's a lot of work up front where you have to prepare things, get things ready. And that's where most agents give up. And the great thing is most agents give up at that point. So have an opportunity because most people are not going to commit to the long haul. Well, and this could be like the one, Monica and I talk about all the time. It's like you have a how you keep in touch with the people that you know and then how do you generate new leads? And this is a great way, if you're not a cold caller, this is a great way to generate new leads to create a bigger sphere, right?

So to answer the question in a broad sense, and then I'll kind of narrow down is I use a thing called the scope method. and that's really the best way to ensure you reach the most people, most effectively, and use your time the most efficiently as well. And it stands for self-promotion, community, online, offline, prospecting, and education. And in order to ensure you reach the most people and get the most of your business, you need to make sure you're checking all of these boxes. Traditional farming was very self-promotion based, and that was just one box. The bad thing is that it doesn't work like it used to.

It used to be able to just send out enough stuff to enough people and they'd know about you, you could promote yourself enough that people go, hey, I'm going to work with Ryan. The reality is there's so many things that are fighting for attention. There's so many things that we could be doing. We need to reach people in different ways. So by focusing on self-promotion alone is not going to get it. You have to also include community. So you have to be doing community events.

Things are giving back and helping the community. You have to be doing online and offline. There's a lot of people who crush it just with online leads or crush it with offline stuff, but you have to make sure you're having that balance in both. You also have to prospect in your business as well. You have to be looking for new, new business and new opportunities for you, and you have to be educating people along the whole way. So then now what is, it's kind of like your framework or your recipe, now you can start filling

in the blanks and saying, okay, where do I need to enhance, where am I missing? What pieces am I missing out of this and working backwards from it? So you can say, okay, hey, I'm great at I'm self-promotion. I'm great at the community stuff, but I may not be great at the education. I may not be great at some of that offline marketing. So you want to kind of reverse engineer what you wanted to do and then say, okay, okay, what's missing my business. And then you learn to what I call strategy stack,

where you work your strategy so they work together, and then you become more efficient with your time. So you're really like a lot of touches are in like a 12 month. I mean, to start in September, are you seeing that most? Because you offer a training in a class. Is that typical results if people follow the process and they do it and they're consistent? Like starting a September results by January?

Yep. That's fast. Two to four months. If you're committed to doing the right things up front. And again, this is where that old school belief on farming is that it takes six to 18 months to see results because you're doing... It was two years, man. And people say, and they say, well, I don't want to do it because it's going to take forever

and it's going to cost me a fortune. Because most people were just doing self-promotion stuff where they're just sending out mailers, when we expand our horizons and open up more opportunities, there are a lot more opportunities for you to get deals. However, you've got to be doing things and you can't just be saying, I'm only getting a agent. That's right. And so many agents want to hide behind just a mailer.

If I just sent out a postcard, then I don't have to do anything, and I'll just sit back and collect deals. And it's like, it doesn't work. It's good. It's work. We always say, like, real estate's a full contact sport without a moment. So is this a mix of a postcard mail or inventory update or sales or whatever you want to do? Also live events or?

It could be. Yeah. If that's the route you want to go, I'm a big believer in community events. and whether that's tacking on or tagging on along to already existing events. So it could be participating in, volunteering in. I wouldn't say sponsoring. A lot of people like to just throw money at sponsorship. And I say get involved more.

You're going to get more results from that. And when people can see you rather than just see your brand, it's really that comes down to having a way to communicate with people and then follow with them long term. And that's why I think the neighbor at a home prices report is so powerful. It's because we like we had, so our farm had 3,600 people. We ended up getting 450 people on our. Yeah, there's two of us that tackled it.

So we had 450 people that were getting our report each month. Those were our key people. So we would love on those people. We would put more attention and time. In my belief, your farm, the geographic area of your farm is really the funnel to fill your funnel, which is the people that you want to build the relationships with. How do you determine that smaller segment? That's the people who put their hands up.

That's the people who respond to the things you're doing. That's the people that are more likely to make a move. I can share stats like our turnover rate on average in our farm was 5.7% turnover rate. And for those you don't know, it's number of homes sales in the year divided by how many homes. So 5.7% of the homes were selling in the people that were getting our report was about 13%. So it was like almost two and a half times more likely to make a move because they were interested in what we were doing. They were putting their hand up. They wanted information.

So our goal was to move people from that big funnel, which is the farm, into our, database into the relationship. That's a really interesting mindset about this because I think people just think, let's grab the farm and try to be able to equally. And so you're doing stuff different for the 450 than you are 30,600 from a financial time effort standpoint. So everything we're doing to the overall farm is to get people into that versus just saying, hey, get my name out to the 3,600 people. It's how do I get them into it? And that's where that shift has to happen. And if you want to get those results quickly, that's where you're going to, you have to reframe how you see it. Okay, I have another question.

What is your top or, you know, top couple techniques for gathering their information? What are people willing to give you their emails or whatever, like without even blinking for? Yeah. So it starts with, I would say, direct response marketing. People have to shift their understanding from sell promotion to direct response marketing. If you don't know what direct response marketing is, it's off making, offers and putting something out there that people are going to respond to rather than try to get your name out there. So when you start to understand direct response marketing, you can see

more opportunities. So our neighbor and home prices report was big. We do a neighborhood watch program where people can see what happens. It's basically reverse. It's like a buyer search, but for sellers. So they can see as homes come up on the market. We did our newsletter was a big part of that. And then for us, we would do community events and do draws and do like contests at at events where people were putting their name up. So that's a very easy way to get out there. It doesn't have to cost you a whole lot of money. And you can piggyback off of.

And even if you're doing like something like that, you can get your vendors to sponsor. Exactly. It doesn't have to cost any money. Yeah, exactly. So if I was starting it all over again, there's very different things that I would do because I stopped doing my farm.

I sold it off my partner a number of years ago. Where I'm seeing people having the best results is focusing on local businesses and doing business interviews. That's one of the easiest and quickest ways to get your name out there. at a very, in a very quick way. You can find local businesses, do some quick interviews, do a two, three minute video, do that. And you're going to get in front of audience very quickly, very efficiently. And you're going to, again, come from a different perspective. You're going to come from that ambassador for the community rather than just a person who wants to sell real estate.

The other thing I would do would be local community Facebook groups. That is one of the most best untapped markets. It's literally people living in your community saying, I live in this area, and you can connect and build relationships with them and see their names, see what's happening. You can really click on their profile and find information with people. Answer their questions. Like provide value inside of those groups.

Agents would have killed to have that kind of connection 20 years ago with farming. You literally can have conversations with people in real time. So that's a big one. And then I still am a firm believer in the neighbor at Home Price Report. That's my partner. She's been doing that in her area

and she's been crushing it and getting people on that and just doing everything to say, hey, how do I get people on this report? And that's kind of the areas I would focus on. That's good. You give a sample of the report to get people to say, oh, yeah, I would like that. That's pretty interesting. No, and the great thing is you don't even need it. So I was just, I have a coaching client that I was doing yesterday. I was saying the great thing is I can pre-sell it before we've even had it. So we have a script that we've mastered. And I said, we, we started ours. We didn't even have anything created. We said, hey, we're creating a report. It's going to be

coming out the first week of the month, which would be interesting getting a copy. And people like, sure. Like, we didn't even have it created yet. We were pre-selling it. We started filling our pipeline with people before we even had it. So we had a postcard and I'm like, it doesn't even, I could literally take my bill here and said, we got a report that's coming out. Did you want to get a copy? And people, once you explain it and you position it correctly, people will go, okay, yeah, that's interesting.

I'd like that. So you don't have to have to have any. I think this new, like a modern process, it feels more authentic, right? To the people that you don't want a cold call, they want to do a relationship business, which is what? What do you think? 99% of real estate agents. So, Ryan, if-

way to do it. Oh my God. No, just kidding. It's a great way. It's just not a great. I have a program called the Launcher Farmy Elite. It's a monthly program. It's 50 bucks a month.

It's super cheap. It's Canadian. So if you're American, it's even cheaper because of the exchange rate. There's over a year's worth of content in there of patch training. We have videos each month. We've got workshops each month. There's all kinds of stuff in there.

It's a great way to get your feet wet into farming at a very affordable price. And then I've got some other stuff. But that's one of the easiest ways. So I would say, if you don't want to spend any money, check out the podcast. I've got 100 plus episodes. Jennifer, by the time this comes out, your episode will be out as well. So they can check that out. But podcast is an easy place to start and just check out what we do and what we're about. One last question is we leave. Best place to buy a list for the geographical farming. Where do you go to do that?

Don't. Make your own. And I would say you can, but it comes down to really building the relationships first. And this is where I think, again, people try to skip ahead and go, I'm going to buy, I'm going to buy data. And that's, again, coming back to relationships. If you had a friend, would you want a friend to say, I bought a friend or I bought your phone number? If you can connect and create that connection, do it that way. But how do you start then?

How do you begin the $3,600? Get out and doork. Okay. Send out flyers, community events, local businesses, by connecting people that way. You can buy lists and it's okay. It's a good way to speed it up. It's just people hide behind buying the list and I don't want to build a list.

You can use it as a tool. And Redex, Has that one of our partners. Red X is great. I've had them on the show. They're great. They're fantastic. But you have to be willing to step outside from behind that list.

Fair enough. That makes sense. Okay. All right. I think that's going to have to be the end of today's battle, Ryan Smith. That was awesome. So much good information. I can imagine spending more time with you as an agent would definitely lead to some cash.

So that's as simple as it gets right there. So we love your information. Thank you so much. All right. Thanks, Monica. Thanks a lot, Ryan. Thanks, Jen. See you next time. Thanks, Ryan. Happy farming, everyone. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Real Estate Fight Club podcast. Make sure to hit the subscribe button so you get updates when new episodes are available.

And we truly love feedback and would appreciate all likes, reviews, and suggestions for future topics.