Understanding Your Competition as a Real Estate Agent
As a real estate agent working in a hard-to-succeed-in industry, you probably have a lot of competition out there. Many different agents working in many different markets, all working towards the same goal of selling and buying properties and winning new business. But are they really competing for the exact same business each time?
The truth is, your competition probably isn’t who you think it is; at least not once you dig a bit deeper into it.
Real estate agents define their competition differently depending on how competitive they are themselves. For example, depending on who you are, you might think that your competition is:
- An agent that works in the same office as you.
- An agent that works in the same neighborhood as you.
- Every single agent that works in the same city as you.
When it comes to competition, it makes sense to take a long, hard look at who your competition actually and truly is. For example, just because someone works in the same neighborhood as you, and maybe even goes to the same listings presentations as you, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re your direct competition every single time.
★ Want to learn a bit more about competition? Have a look at this post called: How To Monitor Your Competition’s Digital Strategy, To Improve Your Own.
If you both went to the same listing presentation, the seller is going to lean towards one of you for many different reasons:
- They connected with their personality better.
- They liked their pitch better.
- They related to them better or felt a better connection to them.
- They liked that they were willing to cut their commission.
- And many, many other reasons.
A lot of the reasons someone actually chooses to work with 1 agent over another doesn’t have anything to do with them directly competing with each other, but rather, just that the person being pitched to liked some characteristic or offering that one of them had over the other; and a lot of times, that’s outside of your control.
Let’s say, for example, that there were 2 agents “competing” for the same listing – one of them was a single person, and the other was a person with a family with young children. If the person at the listing presentation has a family with young children themselves, they’ll probably gravitate towards the agent with the family as well: simply because they can relate to them more. So in that case, even though they’re competing for the same listing, they weren’t really competition at all.
To be successful as an agent, and to be better than your ‘competition’, there’s also a lot of power in focusing on a niche. It’s all about differentiating yourself.
An agent, with no special focus, that’s willing to work with anyone and everyone, and willing to drive 100 miles to do it, is going to have a lot of competition inherently.
★ Want to know more about specialization in real estate? Have a look at these posts:
- Carving a Niche to Get Better Real Estate Leads
- Building a Hyper-Local Real Estate Marketing Strategy
- The Power of Specialization in a Low Listings Market
Building a niche allows you to be more relatable to the people you’re talking to, and in a lot of cases, have them choose to work with you without interviewing any other agents.
For example, if you had a really specific niche of being the person that exclusively works with estate sales, and you were seen as an expert when it came to those types of transactions, then if you went to the same listing presentation as someone if your office, and it was for an estate sale, you’ll win the business every single time because you’ve built a strong focus around that type of transaction.
Determining your competition also has a lot to do with understanding your target audience. If you have a better idea of who you want to work with, as well as who you don’t want to work with, you’ll be able to better build that focus on business that brings in better leads, and helps you win more business when you are competing.
★ If you want to learn more about target audience, have a look at these posts:
- Finding Your Target Audience, and Why You Should
- Why Your Target Audience Shouldn’t Be Anyone and Everyone
- Why Personal, Targeted Marketing Means Better Real Estate Leads
One of the main reasons it makes sense to take a deeper dive into understanding who your competition really is has to do with planning the success of your overall marketing plan. If you think you compete with everyone, then your marketing plan will need to be fairly generic; however, if you take some time to really think about who your competition really is, you can fine-tune your marketing plan to be much more successful and set yourself up for success.
Want to get better, more qualified leads and build your authority? Our Inbound Marketing Guide is a walkthrough of the overall philosophy of inbound marketing, why it’s effective, and how you can build it into your own real estate marketing strategy to get better marketing results.
