Use local real estate data to become big in a small micro-niche

The famous CEO of General Electric Jack Welch is credited with turning that company around and turning it into the international powerhouse that it is today.

Welch  had a background as an engineer and possessed a great ability to take things apart and break them down into their basic elements.

While GE had splintered off in a million different directions, he basically made the decision that “we are not going to get into the market unless we can be No 1 or No. 2.”

You can apply the same principle to real estate. And you can use hyper-local data and map-based technology from Home Junction to easily achieve this goal.

Welch’s directive was simple. There was no mental wrangling over strategies, or arguments in the boardroom about losing out on this industry or that.

If his executives could not make the case for GE to dominate a market, then he didn’t want them wasting their time involved in that market.

This dilution of focus can be fatal for many companies. For example, GE, which is known for light bulbs, owned NBC TV. Family sitcoms have very little to do with the manufacturing of microwaves (as Tina Fey liked to point out on the show “50 Rock.”).

As a real estate broker or agent, this principle is important to you as well. You cannot cover all the real estate sales in the entire United States  although you certainly would like to take home those commissions.

It’s difficult to cover even an entire county.

One agent, Gail Robinson decided she is going to dominate a portion of a small town in the small state of Connecticut. One-square mile . And in her blog, she claims to be doing very well.

There are many advantages to carving out a micro-niche for yourself.

The first and most important advantage is how you can position yourself on the search engines as the authority in that area.

The big mega-real estate portals such as Trulia, Zillow (soon to be Zulia) and Realtor.com do very well ranking high on Google for large areas.

But they don’t know the micro-niche neighborhoods like you do.

With hyper-local data from data providers such as Home Junction, you can flood your site with information about any particular area.

For example, Home Junction allows you to carve out what data experts call a “shape,” created by defining the boundaries of your specialized area.

There, you can post on your site information such as:

Schools –  not only a list of schools, but detailed information about that particular school – number of students, number of teachers, name of the principal, school website, etc.

Local Businesses – what are the local businesses in that micro-niche. Perhaps there’s an extremely popular restaurant everybody is talking about within a five-mile range.

While people will be “talking” continually about the latest gourmet hot spot, you can tell your clients how they will actually able to eat their more frequently because it’s right down the street, not a trip across town for them.

Market Trends – what’s going on in that area in regard to homes sales? What is the trend in prices? While homes over in neighborhood A may be skyrocketing, perhaps home prices in your target micro-niche area aren’t and it would be smart for a buyer to grab a property now before they do escalate.

Places of Worship – important to families and also shows you have hyper-local knowledge.

Crime Rates – ditto.

With Home Junction, you can also display tons of local data on a platform called SpatialMatch that is a basically a map you can integrate with an MLS feed.

How cool is that?

This enables you to not only show hyper-local data, but where it is located in relation to the any property a buyer might be considering.

Carving out your own micro-niche, according to Robinson, has many other advantages as well – you frequently see your clients in person at the stores or community events which can generate leads and referrals for you, because your focus on a small area you can save time driving, there’s also the safety factor of knowing the neighborhood, and you can really gain an in-depth knowledge of home prices.

In her blog, Gail said she is doing so well she is bringing on an assistant and “this is going to be my best year in real estate.”

What more do you need to know?

Carve out your own mini-market. Easily embed a ton of hyper-local data about that market from companies such as Home Junction and literally become a dominant player in that market, almost overnight.

To learn more about Home Junction’s real estate data services, click here.

To read Gail’s blog about her micro-niche success, go here.