Video Transcript

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Brian Icenhower: When we talk about geographic farming today, I’m going to tell you a lot of the secrets that our top teams use to acquire listings, and a lot of it is with the help of Vulcan 7 and, as Melissa mentioned, their neighborhood search tool. It’s such a powerful tool because we’re able to get contact information: verified emails, multiple cell phone numbers, mailing addresses, and names of people in different neighborhoods.

We don’t do that to annoy. We do that to try to add value to these people. I think a lot of us are much more comfortable trying to get business from people we don’t know when we’re not bothering them, we’re actually helping them. What we’re going to talk about today is a true way to help them.

Before I do that, I want to back up, because farming is a little different than prospecting for expireds or FSBOs. We coach and train all of these different methods, and I like them all. But I really am a big fan of farming. It’s probably closer to marketing to your sphere of influence, because there is a little bit of a patience game. When you’re farming, you’re often marketing to people who don’t want to buy or sell right now.

When we’re working with FSBOs and expireds, we know these people are trying to sell their home. When we market to your sphere of influence, there are a lot of people we’re trying to stay first of mind with by adding value through a lot of different channels. We can do it through social media, email, mailers, personal drop-bys, client events. I can keep going with all the different ways we layer our communication to stay first of mind, to look busy, to look successful. That way, when they do raise their hand and say, “Hey, I really need some help finding a home or selling a home,” they reach out to us.

A lot of agents don’t have the patience for that. Only a small percentage even get the database of all the people they know into a CRM and market to it. But with the most successful real estate teams, at least the ones we coach, that’s first and foremost. We always want to get that SOI together, and then we can find different ways to prospect for new business from people we don’t know on top of that platform.

As we meet people and build relationships, they slowly go back into our SOI. So we’re not always having to chase all of the business we get. We want to take care of those relationships so that every now and then they just come to us. It’s a complete offensive system where we’re out there generating new business and taking care of the relationships we have.

Farming is very similar to your SOI in that way. We may not know everybody in a farm. It’s an isolated group of people that we’re trying to build a relationship with through our marketing and our engagement, and it takes a very high level of patience.

I think a lot of people have tried farming and they identify farming as just sending out mailers. Before the internet, that’s all farming was: just listed, just sold, market updates. And that stuff still works, don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying you shouldn’t do that, but it does cost money.

That’s the big downfall with mailers. And it’s just one touch. It’s one layer. You can get those names and addresses through the neighborhood search tool at Vulcan 7, like a lot of our clients do. I’m not against that. I think it works very well.

In fact, the baby boomer generation is really comfortable with mailers. You email my mother, she may not see that. You put it on social media, she probably will not see that. But if you give her something tangible, that’s what my mother is used to.

And the thing about boomers is they live in very expensive homes that are very fun to list and get paid on. So it is important to diversify your communication if you want to hit the higher price points. I don’t want you to think mailers are a bad thing.

They’re just expensive, and it’s very hard to send a lot of them. So it’s important we diversify with more affordable ways to do it, and hit different people who may not respond to mailers. With me, those mailers come and they go right in the trash can.

But that’s okay. There are enough people who will pick them up. It’s just like sending an email. It’s a very small open rate, a very small percentage of people. So we’re really playing a game of trying to find the yeses, not worrying so much about the nos.

You will get unsubscribes. That will happen. That is part of the game. We’re trying to push a bunch of swords forward to see which ones get through, and not worry that it’s a low conversion rate game where only a small percentage are going to work. That’s what top producers know.

People who don’t want to spend the money, or who are reluctant to be rejected, unfortunately just say, “No, that’s not working. I had 30 unsubscribes.” That’s part of the deal. Or, “Only 1% opened that email.” That’s part of the deal. That’s not a terrible open rate.

We can improve on it, for sure. But we need to be thinking from a positive, abundant mindset, not the scarcity of all the nos.

So let’s get into it. We have a neighborhood. Let’s call it Whispering Woods. This is a neighborhood where we would like to be the agent of choice, where we list most of the homes. To do that, we have to start with a database. We use Vulcan’s neighborhood search, and I prefer the premium neighborhood search because it gives you multiple cell phone numbers and verified email addresses, things that will really help us.

It’ll help increase our conversion rates in a very big way. When you get the standard neighborhood search tool, you do get some free credits to go premium, and I would try it out. It’s a great way to get a database together and start marketing to them. A very easy thing to do, from a social media standpoint, is something called Facebook retargeting.

I think Facebook refers to that as a customer list custom audience. You can hop into your AI or Google and ask, “How do I set up a customer list custom audience?” I’m not going to tell you what to click on here, but I want to give you the gist of it. We take an email CSV file right out of the neighborhood search tool and upload it into Facebook, so we can run ads that are much less expensive than mailers, depending on how big this Whispering Woods neighborhood is.

Let’s say it’s got 200 houses in there. It’s going to be very affordable compared to mailers, a fraction of the cost. All of a sudden, we can be running just listeds, just solds, open houses, market updates, reels, and videos promoting that neighborhood so that you stay first of mind. That’s called hyperlocal marketing, when you’re marketing to a specific neighborhood.

That is very powerful, especially with the world of AI. When people search for homes in specific neighborhoods, you really fly below the big guys on Google Search, like Zillow and Realtor.com. They typically aren’t that hyperlocal.

So if you create a landing page off of your normal agent website that is dedicated to Whispering Woods, tells some information about it, and shows some of the listings in there, all of a sudden you’ll start showing up when people search, “Who’s the best agent to find me a Whispering Woods home?”

AI pretty much looks at Google, and they will pull you up. The one place AI is not looking is social media, unless you count YouTube as social media. So creating YouTube videos about specific neighborhoods is very powerful too.

We get in between the specific property searches that people are addicted to Zillow for. What they don’t know about is the neighborhoods. “Here’s where the school district is, and here are the shopping malls.” So creating short YouTube videos is very powerful.

Then we put those into our Facebook ads, and it demonstrates to everyone that you know all the best amenities of the Whispering Woods neighborhood and what it’s like to live there: the parks, the schools, the best shopping districts, the proximity to different amenities in town.

You’re evidencing to people that you are the Whispering Woods agent. Quick little videos like that are very powerful. We can put them into Meta retargeting, so it’s showing up on Facebook, and at the same time we’ve created a YouTube video.

AI will pay heavy attention to YouTube videos because YouTube is owned by Google, and Google is the main source of information for artificial intelligence. You’ll very quickly establish yourself as the neighborhood expert without even showing you’ve got a listing in there, because no one is typically marketing that hyperlocal.

They’re usually marketing to the whole town, the whole city, the whole county. They’re not diving in and getting niche specific. So Facebook retargeting is a really big one to use with email addresses.

Understand one thing. I told you that we work with a lot of teams and high producers. What I’m telling you about is setting up systems, and that is a big thing with me. Agents are very social creatures, and we’re very good with people. But when it comes to setting up systems and working with calendars and routines, it’s not as fun.

It’s the work part of the job. So have a good morning routine where you’re working on this stuff every single morning, just chipping away at it. Maybe it’s an hour a morning where you’re learning how to export email addresses and import them, and learning how to set up your customer list.

Every single morning we’re doing this work, always leaving our afternoons free for working with clients, socializing, meeting people, doing the stuff we absolutely love. A lot of our teams will actually set up farms for the different agents. Their marketing administrator or their admin, depending on how big they are, does this background work so the agents are out there selling.

It’s very easy to help agents farm their own neighborhoods or their favorite neighborhoods so they have another source of business, because most agents simply won’t do the systems work on their own. They gravitate to just talking to people, which is great.

That’s important, but it’s very hard to create a sustainable flow of business if we’re not willing to do the work part of the job. So on a lot of teams, the admin and operations department will do that for them.

It’s up to you which way you want to go. But it does need to get done, because most people get stuck at that level.

So far we’ve talked about mailers. We’ve talked about retargeting Facebook ads. We’ve talked about creating YouTube videos for AI search and Google search. Now they’re starting to see us everywhere. They got a mailer, they saw the video, and they happened to go on Facebook. They’re starting to see this person more visibly, and that gives them confidence.

“Okay, this guy knows our neighborhood. I feel safe calling this guy.” One thing I do want to mention with AI and the YouTube video: you should all have Google Business Profiles. When you go to Google and type your name, like “Brian Icenhower Realtor,” a box should show up, and that’s your Google Business Profile.

You’ve seen this when you’ve looked at different businesses on Google. It’s very convenient. We tend to gravitate there, and Google is now moving it to the center in most places. All of the search results are below that box.

They really want to emphasize the importance of your Google Business Profile. Because YouTube is owned by Google, it’s very easy to set up so that any YouTube video you post auto-populates to that page. That is a key determinant in Google’s search algorithm, and it’s something AI leans on tremendously.

You wonder which sources AI pulls from. They pull from that Google Business Profile in a very big way. So we want to have a lot of client reviews there too. It’s the most important review in the business, because that’s what tells AI that this is a very trusted agent. And we want a very active Google Business Profile.

We want lots of videos going up there regularly, lots of photos. Every new listing you get needs to be put up on that Google Business Profile, almost treating it like a social media channel that needs lots of new content. That’s what Google likes for its algorithm, so that’s what AI likes for its searches for agents. We’re seeing a rapidly increasing number of people who search there instead of Google.

People are very thorough when they’re looking for listing agents. It’s not like buyer’s agents, where they look for the house first and then whichever agent can open the door. With listings, they want to make sure they have the best agent. It’s very important that AI thinks you are, and that they start to see you as a hyper-focused agent in their specific neighborhood.

Another way to keep targeting, especially when you’re trying to break into a farm the first time, is to get these things set up and then really look for expireds and FSBOs that come up in the farm. Those we want to add a lot of value to.

That’s a great way to break in and get our first listing. Once we get a listing in that farm, things get a lot easier. We can do just listed marketing around it and hold lots of open houses. We can meet clients. Once we get a listing, we have something to talk about other than, “Hey, just use me,” or, “Hey, your neighborhood’s great.”

We can now say, “Watch how hard I market your neighbor’s home.” People care about that. They want to know what their neighbor’s home sells for. They want to know how quickly it sold. They’re very nosy. Neighbors want to know about each other, and a great way to add value is to tell them about the other listings in a lot of different ways.

So pay close attention to FSBOs and expireds inside of a geographic farm. With a FSBO, you want to add value. You’re helping them out when they have an open house. You’re trying to build trust and a relationship over time.

Give them CMAs. We have a specific follow-up plan for FSBOs that we coach and train that lasts over an eight-week period. We initially call and see if they’re interested in working with us, and if not, we keep adding value and staying in contact to build rapport over time.

Most FSBOs either sell or list with an agent, and if you’re the one who has built the most trust, that FSBO is going to come your way. So we work those very hard. With expireds, we do what we always do. We call them and see if they’ll list with us. Hopefully we’ve got a few of these other systems set up so you can say, “I specialize in your neighborhood,” and show them all the work.

You can send them a pre-listing video. That’s the video you put on YouTube about that specific neighborhood and how you market to it. It’s going to give you a huge inside track, especially if they’ve already seen you from all these different things we’re doing.

Now, probably the most important one comes from the most unlikely source. This is the last one I want to talk about, and it’s going to shock you at first. I want to talk about listing e-alerts, but not the way you think of them.

They’re called different things in different places. You use them with buyers. You have a buyer who wants a certain property. You go into the MLS, and a lot of CRMs have these built in as well.

We type their name in and put in the specific things they’re looking for: this location, this price point, this size home, this many bedrooms. We put that criteria into the CRM or MLS system, where you typically get it for free.

Now anytime a new listing comes up for sale that matches their criteria, that email goes right to them, so they’re first to know. They’ll know it before Zillow. I know a lot of people are addicted to Zillow, but we’ve got to battle Zillow a bit here.

We want them in our systems. We want them in our sales funnel. So when they say, “Well, I already look on Zillow,” understand that Zillow is a secondary data feed, and you often get listings much later because of it. Oftentimes when a listing hits Zillow, it’s no longer available, because the most desirable homes are aggressively sought after by multiple buyers.

You need to be able to see these right away. So we set our listing alerts to go out the minute they’re live. You can set listing alerts to send weekly or monthly. Don’t ever do those.

Always do immediately, so they go right away. Then I’ll say, “I’m going to give you full realtor access to the MLS, which means you’re going to see the listings before any of the agents do.” And I’m not lying, because very rarely do agents wake up every morning and look at every new listing first thing.

But they’re going to get that email first thing in the morning. So that’s a very valuable tool, and it becomes very important for the listing side. Why? If I’ve got a listing lead coming up anywhere, not just in a farm, they may say, “I don’t want to list until next summer, after my kid graduates.”

I’ll say, “Great. How about I set you up on listing e-alerts for your specific neighborhood? Every time a listing comes up in your neighborhood, you can look through all the photos of your neighbor’s home, so you’ll see the inside of it. You can compare the amenities, features, and size of the listings to your own home, and you’ll know the price of each new listing to get a rough idea of the current value of your home.

“You’re going to see how quickly each home sells and the prices they ultimately sell for, and this will give you a good idea of how the value of your own home is increasing or decreasing from month to month, based on the comparable sales in the neighborhood. It’ll also keep you up to date on your local neighborhood’s market conditions.”

I have six points in that script, and that script should be tattooed on your arm. We’ve got to know it. That’s how we convert every listing lead that’s not ready right now: we get them to start working in our systems.

They’ll say, “Yeah, that’s great.” I’ll say, “If you get too many emails, just let me know. I’m going to set it up for your neighborhood only.” Then you go into the neighborhood search tool inside Vulcan 7 and do a map search for that neighborhood.

You can do a map search in the MLS too. We don’t want to send them too many emails, or they will unsubscribe. Let’s just give them their specific neighborhood or quadrant of town, so they’re kept up to date, looking at exactly what an appraiser would look at when he appraises the value of their home.

This is real estate relevant education that they care about. You notice the first of those six talking points was, “Look through all the photos of your neighbor’s home,” because that’s what they really like to do. That’s why you see all the neighbors coming by your open houses. They want to look inside.

A very small percentage of homes are held as open houses, so they don’t get to see them. If we can let them look inside every new listing and be the first to know when it comes up, they want that very bad.

And guess what? So does your geographic farm. So we set everybody in the farm up on listing e-alerts. We’ve got email addresses for every single one of them. Usually there’s an introduction email letting them know, and we have scripts for that that we teach our clients. Then we put that video on Facebook, retargeted to them.

“Hey, Whispering Woods neighbors, I want you to be on the lookout. You’re going to get an email from us, and it’s going to give you full realtor access to the MLS, so you can see when one of your neighbors’ homes comes up for sale before even real estate agents see it.”

I go through my six value props, and then I send an email that says the same thing, with the same YouTube video embedded inside it. That’s my introduction. Then they start receiving the emails, and they become addictive.

When I hold open houses in my farm, I do the same thing. I always have a goal with my teams: if you have 20 people through, I want at least half of them set up on listing e-alert emails. All the buyer leads: why are they looking at houses by open house?

We wouldn’t do that. Why should they? Those are the houses nobody else wants. The houses that go right away never make it to an open house. Those are the best priced. Those are the most desirable.

So set them all up on listing e-alerts. Same with the neighbors. I use the exact same script. “One of the things we’re doing for all the Whispering Woods clients is giving them full realtor access to the MLS. Anytime a Whispering Woods home comes up for sale, you’re going to be the first to know, by email.

“Any interest in that? You can always unsubscribe if you don’t like it, but most of my clients absolutely love it.” You’re going to see more and more people in that neighborhood sign up, and you can go in and see if they’re opening these emails.

This will be the one email they actually like. I own rental properties all over the place, and I am set up on listing e-alerts around every single one of them, because I love to see how the value of my assets is going up or down, just like they want to see with their own home.

So it’s very tangible, and it’s creating a sales funnel where we can build new relationships and cultivate those leads. They’re going to keep seeing your name. They’re going to keep receiving that value from you over time. It’s going to be increasingly unlikely that they would ever list with somebody else, because you’ve established yourself as the neighborhood expert.

You’re also giving them things. They’re using your tools. They’re kind of a jerk if they don’t list their home with you. With buyers, we all know how to use it. With listing leads, it’s very powerful. At open houses, it’s very powerful. That’s how we actually do something with the open house, rather than just saying, “Do you want me to help you see a house?”

We get them in our sales funnel, so it’s automatic lead follow-up, and now we’re able to call them a month later. “I just wanted to check and make sure you’re not getting too many emails. Or are you getting enough?” It’s customer service about a product of ours that they are using.

Same in the geographic farm. “I’m just checking back to get some feedback from you. I saw that you’re receiving our listing e-alert emails. How are you liking those?” We’re not selling anything. We’re making another touch. That’s a phone call touch.

We’ve hit email. We’ve hit mailers. We’ve hit Facebook. We’ve hit YouTube. We’ve hit Google search. We’ve hit AI. It’s lots of different touches through different channels so that we’re always first of mind, just like we would be with a sphere of influence. In fact, a lot of my teams use the neighborhood search tool and listing e-alerts for every member of their SOI.

So all the people they know are kept up to date on the value of their own home. You can see this is a lot of systems work. It’s one of the reasons you see it done by top teams, namely the ones we coach, because there’s a lot of sitting in front of a computer getting it set up, and teams have operations and admin staff who do that for them.

That’s not to say you can’t do it as an individual agent. You can, but you have to have a strong morning routine. Every single morning, you chip away and set these tools up, because they are kind of set it and forget it.

Those emails just go out once they’re set up. With Facebook retargeting, once the custom list is in there, it’s just uploading an ad and marketing to them once a week.

Very easy, and very inexpensive compared to mailers. So it’s getting those things done each morning, and then in the afternoon we’re out working with clients, meeting people, socializing, doing our thing.

It’s also stuff you can’t really see. It’s not like social media marketing, where you just watch what the top agents do and copy them. Unfortunately, a lot of those people aren’t top agents, because that’s all they’re doing. That’s not enough.

There are other systems that need to get set up, especially if you want to grow a real estate team and work with other people so all the production isn’t dependent on you. You’ve got to provide something to them. And this is very valuable.

You wonder why an agent would go to a team for a 50/50 split. It’s because all this is getting set up. They’re more concerned about net income than about their split. They’re making more money at 50/50, and they’re getting more listings at 50/50, because all these things are being done for them.

That’s one of the things a lot of my teams are big on: providing strong operations support.

Farming is one of my favorite ways to generate business, I think because I used to do it. I haven’t sold real estate myself since way back. But I do remember, in the ’90s, the way you felt as a listing agent walking into a geographic farm. You were like a celebrity. They knew who you were. The kids knew who you were, because they’d seen the mailers and the flyers.

Nowadays, the parents will have seen you everywhere on social media and online. When you sit down and talk about the price of the home, they just say, “Yes, sir.” It’s different. A sphere of influence listing feels good because they know you and they trust you. That doesn’t mean they respect you enough to trust you on the price.

But with farm listings, you’re not arguing price. They know you know that neighborhood. It’s a very good feeling when you walk in and you’re truly treated like an expert. They just listen to you. They don’t fight you because they’ve sold five or six houses in their life.

So I hope these tips help you get some systems set up behind your business, so you can get a consistent flow of income and not go up and down with the real estate market. You can start to find a gas pedal: add new farms if you want more business, or up the cadence of the marketing in your farm if you want more business from that farm.

It gives you a way to control your business a little better when you operate with systems. I hope this helps, guys.