Farming Expired Listings

(In this new multi-part series, we’ll take a look at the successful real estate agent’s marketing plan)

As a real estate agent and / or Realtor, the single most important aspect of your career is to come up with a rock-solid marketing plan.  A well thought out and executed marketing plan will not only help to create your business but it will also define your success as a real estate agent.  Word-of-mouth advertising is one of the most sought after types of advertising in real estate but it is not the most lucrative and you almost have to have your business set up and running smoothly before being able to take advantage of this type of advertising.  No real estate agent, whether they’re just starting out or have 20 years in the business, can survive on word-of-mouth advertising alone.  In fact, a successful real estate agent marketing campaign should be multi-pronged in its approach.  It should consist of farming expired listings, marketing to FSBO sellers, a ‘geographic neighborhood’ campaign (or several) as well as being a buyers agent.  For this segment of the series, we’ll be focusing on farming expired listings.

Farming expired listings is perhaps one of the easier types of marketing a real estate agent can do.  As has already been discussed, property owners whose home has been listed and has been expired have already gotten past the hurdle ‘ Why should I list with a Real Estate Agent?’  Therefore, you must now concentrate your focus on answering their question ‘Why should I list with you when the last real estate agent I hired let my property expire?’  99.99999% of the time, the answer to the ‘why did my property expire’ question is the same: price.  Let’s get beyond that for the moment though and simply focus on your ability to actually market to expire listings.  When sending out expired listing letters to potential clients, ask yourself the following questions:

1. Is your expired listing marketing strong enough to put you in the ‘do call’ list?
2. Have your expired listing letters been created to eliminate cold-calling?  (Remember ‘do not call laws’ may prevent you from contacting the expired lister via telephone)
3. Are your real estate agent letters professional and do they convey the proper image?
4. Are your expired listing letters strong enough to get you multiple responses from every mailing?
5. Are your efforts in farming expired listings cost effective with the results they provide?

Take some time to answer these questions honestly and to the best of your ability and in our next part in this series we’ll explore what your answers say about your farming expired listing efforts and where you may have room to improve.

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