Niche Marketing

Consumers pay for expertise — not processing, so pick your niche and starting making yourself the expert! 

No doubt about it, times are changing.

Mortgage offerings meant to make it easier for people to get into homes, and to keep the infrastructure of the mortgage banking institutions humming along, have backfired. Buyers are waiting for someone to signal the "bottom," and sellers are hoping that prices will get back on their track of historic highs. Most definitely, times are changing; and we must change with them.

In an effort to understand what the future holds for the residential real estate industry, I asked about 3,500 CRS-designated agents to articulate what they thought were the skills and capabilities needed to be successful in these shifting times. While this information will form the basis for a book later this year, I thought I would share some of the perspectives gained from this work, as well as some of my own thoughts here, and I hope you will add your own comments on the lore blog.

As an introduction, before I got involved with the residential real estate industry, I had a long history of developing and marketing new products for consumers. Since it costs so much to launch a new product (in 1990 about $36 million), we spent a lot of money on researching the potential customer and how they would respond to the product, package, message and more. In 2001, I started studying the real estate consumer and have completed many national studies about how they approach the transaction, where they get information, what they want from a professional, and the like.*

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