Farm: The Real Estate Agent's Ultimate Guide to Farming Neighborhoods

By Brian Icenhower

Learn the strategies and methods top producing real estate agents use to successfully farm neighborhoods to become the community real estate expert of choice. Learn the systems that real estate coach Brian Icenhower implements with many of the top producing agents in the world to create steady and predictable sources of commission income from targeted geographic communities. Get the business generation strategies, techniques, scripts and tools to build your real estate geographic farming business from the ground up.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu Publishing Services
• Release date: Sep 18, 2017
• ISBN: 9781483470047

Book preview

FARM

The Real Estate Agent’s Ultimate

Guide to Farming Neighborhoods

BRIAN ICENHOWER

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Copyright © 2017 Brian Icenhower.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted by any means—whether auditory, graphic, mechanical, or electronic—without written permission of the author, except in the case of brief excerpts used in critical articles and reviews. Unauthorized reproduction of any part of this work is illegal and is punishable by law.

ISBN: 978-1-4834-7005-4 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4834-7004-7 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017908224

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Lulu Publishing Services rev. date: 06/07/2017

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Brian Icenhower, BS, JD, CRB, CRS, GRI, ABR

Real estate executive, speaker and coach Brian Icenhower is the creator of TheRealEstateTrainer.com, the world’s leading production training website for real estate agents.

Mr. Icenhower is also the Founder & President of Icenhower Coaching & Consulting (ICC), which offers structured real estate coaching programs designed to fit the specific needs of real estate agents and brokers seeking to increase their business income while maintaining balanced lives.

In addition, Brian is an attorney, a real estate broker, a real estate litigation expert witness, and one of the most recognized names in the real estate industry.

Brian Icenhower began his career in real estate by working as a top producing real estate broker. Since then he has launched, owned and/or operated a number of the most successful real estate brokerage companies in the United States. These production-focused companies featured extensive agent training and coaching programs while providing a highly engaging and focused environment where agents could effectively grow their businesses. The resulting growth in agent count, sales production and year-over-year production per agent in these offices has earned repeated recognition from several nationally-recognized real estate industry reporting organizations.

Brian Icenhower is also a former instructor in real estate law at the College of the Sequoias, as well as a consultant and expert witness for District Attorney real estate fraud units. Mr. Icenhower has also opened and operated escrow companies, real estate licensing schools, property management companies, and commercial real estate divisions.

Brian served as the President of the Tulare County Association of REALTORS® in 2011, and has served as a California Association of REALTORS® State Director, a Missouri Association of REALTORS® State Director, and as a National Association of REALTORS® Director.

INTRODUCTION

I have used the marketing strategies in this book to successfully farm local communities to gain the most market share and brand my name with residents as the local real estate expert of choice.

Eric Craig, $43 million in annual sales volume & 184 homes sold per year

The consistent application of these farming techniques has helped me sell over 100 homes per year throughout my real estate career. Best of all they can be systemized to run like an efficient machine.

— Brad Baldwin, 125 homes sold per year

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Want a good laugh? Watch a person try to catch a bumblebee.

It’s often a hilarious sight.

The tiny bee zooming about. The person trying and failing to capture it. And all the resulting chaos - from broken windows to curse words, and beyond.

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That darn bee!

Yes, the situation often looks hilarious. At least to us.

But imagine being the one in pursuit of the bumblebee. Imagine if you were the one failing, time and again to capture it.

Then your efforts probably wouldn’t be funny. Not to you.

In place of humor, you’d have frustration at being unable to catch the bumblebee. And you might grow increasingly desperate to find a solution.

Fortunately, there is a way to catch the bumblebee. A tried-and-true method to end the chase in your favor.

What should you do?

We’ll get to that in a moment.

Before we do, there’s a more immediate question to address. A question you probably have, after all this talk about bumblebees.

How does any of this relate to real estate?

The answer is that as REALTORS®, we’re often chasing bumblebees. Not literally. Yet in the same analogous sense.

Think about a REALTOR® who works with home buyers. Maybe that’s you. Or maybe it’s someone you know - personally or professionally.

Whoever this REALTOR® is, they need buyers. Otherwise, their business suffers.

The problem, though, is that buyers can be hard to catch. Like the bumblebee, buyers often zoom around, evading capture.

One minute for example, a buyer is easily reachable. The next, it’s like they joined the Witness Relocation Program. Nothing but voicemail.

Does that deter most REALTORS®? No, like the pursuer of the bee, REALTORS® often continue the chase. Leaving voicemails with increasing desperation and making fools of themselves.

Not that every buyer disappears. Sometimes a buyer remains perfectly visible. But they’ll purposely confuse the REALTOR®. This leaves the REALTOR® uncertain whether they have any chance of ever working with the buyer.

So once more, as with the bumblebee, a REALTOR® continues the chase. Pushing onward in the vain hope of success. And looking comical in the process.

Tired of the chase?

You don’t have to continue on it. You can catch the buyer. There’s a clear way to do it.

It’s the same way, figuratively-speaking, as with catching the bumblebee.

In either case, victory comes from holding what both targets find important.

For a bee, the object of importance is the flower. It’s where they gather to pollinate. Get the flower and you’ll have no difficulty attracting the bee.

The same holds for real estate. Your flowers in real estate are listings. Hold the listings and you’ll have no issue attracting buyers. Buyers will see your listings and then contact you about them. Knowing this, the key to representing a lot of buyers is to get a lot of listings.

Look around and you’ll find this to be true. Think about the top producing REALTORS® in your own community. Chances are, those at the top are primarily listings agents. It’s very rare to see someone who’s big on the buyer’s side being a top agent. Not impossible. Just very rare.

One reason for that, as we’ve said, is the bumblebee chasing issue. Another is that listings agents are working in a much smarter way. Forget about the bee and think about workload. In the time it takes to work with a single buyer, an agent could work with four active listings. This means that, on a larger scale, agents could handle 160 active listings in the time it would take to work with 40 buyers. Listings agents are therefore capable of producing substantially greater results - often four times that of the buying agent - without working any harder.

While listings matter, it’s important to know how they matter. You want listings, but not for their own sake. Instead, listings should be viewed in the larger context of farming.

Farming? Yes, though not in any agricultural sense. Rather farming in the sense of real estate. It’s the focus of this book, and the proper frame in which to view listings. To understand how listings fit, let’s take a look at what farming - as it pertains to real estate - is all about.

For starters, we need to define farming. In a real estate context, farming refers to a specific strategy for achieving real estate success. This strategy involves selecting a specific geographic area, such as a neighborhood, and then establishing yourself as the agent in that area. In doing this, your goal is to become so well-known that residents of the area instinctively think of you when planning to list their houses. You want to be the no brainer choice for these residents when the time comes.

How do you become a no brainer? The key is highly targeted marketing. As a real estate farmer, you won’t be marketing in the traditional shotgun way. So-called shotgun marketing means broadly blasting your message onto a lot of media without targeting any specific audiences. It’s sloppy, costly, and - as you might expect - overwhelmingly unsuccessful.

Rather than shotgun marketing, you should focus on farming. As you do, you’ll systematically contact a specific group of people in a clearly-defined geographic area. And you’ll do it repeatedly too. So often that you eventually become the agent everyone in a neighborhood turns to, when listing their homes.

Notice again our emphasis on listings. Farming agents are listings agents. Listings fit into their farming strategy, offering a means of building name-brand recognition and becoming highly visible.

Agents can achieve recognition and visibility, for example, by having for sale signs up