A real estate agent shares what went wrong testing geo-farming tools. Discover Pubs cost little per copy but generated almost nothing in nine months. Listing Grabber worked better, producing nine deals in 18 months, but the whole strategy takes 2-3 years and year one is brutal.
Questions this video answers
12-page color newspaper.
Approximately $0.54 per delivered copy (speaker also cited higher pricing when starting smaller, e.g., ~$0.85).
At least 2–3,000 homes; speaker said "I think you have to have at least 3000."
About nine months ("in nine months it didn't do much").
About 18 months into the farm (speaker: "We have 18 months now into this farm").
Geographic farming. So geographic farming is a really great idea. When you're in year like 3, 4, 5, 6, it's quite painful to start a geographic farm out of the gate. So I'm going to tell all of you exactly what I did and, and warn you against how painful it is in its first year. So I've done two things here in terms of geographic farming. The first one is I did Discover Pubs, which I loved. It's a 12 page color newspaper that I was doing it to 10,000 homes and it was 54 cents a copy delivered for 12 page color newspaper. If any of you do Discover Pub, start small. Start with a thousand or two thousand homes and go hyperlocal with the content. Start small and go hyperlocal with the content. Pricing will be higher. It could be at like 85 cents or something like that. I think 2 or 3,000 is the minimum. So I think you have to have at least 3000. So 24, 2500 bucks a month. That's an easy thing to get to offset or have vendors pay for because you can go to local restaurants. You can really get creative with getting zero basing that. We stopped it though Discover Pubs. We stopped it because in nine months it didn't do much for us. So Discover Pubs is. I just love the concept of it. But if you're going to do it, do it hyperlocal. So get someone to write local content. You'll have to get like a local writer. You can get writers to work for next to Nothing. So it's DiscoverPubs.com and you've got to commit to it. You've got to commit to it for the long term. Start with as small as they'll let you start and then commit to it for 12, 18, 24 months. So this is, I have cash, you know, I have 25,000 and I really wanted to break into this farm and I'm going to commit to it for a period of time. And I guess they have. It's not zip code availability. I think it's subdivision availability. Okay. And then we shifted to listing Grabber, which we were in nine, 10 months in. And just as we canceled in that same farm. So I have 18 months now into this farm. We got a pretty good response and we've written nine deals on listing grabber this year. But there could have been some benefit of me having Discover Pubs in those same areas as well. So it's, it's just having a direct response elements and building up authority over the same homes over time. But it is a two to three plus year process. So don't even think of geographic farming unless you're in it for that period of time. Listing grabber, I don't know what their minimum is. I just kept it on the same 10, 11,000 homes. We just did a review with them and they turns out that 35% of the homes did 55% of the response. So their approach is to get them to respond. Gets them to respond. It goes into a database and then you're basically sending out different stuff after they respond and you're nurturing that person. We did it to the same 10,000. I don't think there is a minimum. I think it's subdivision. But we're actually cutting out 65% of the people we mailed to because we're getting, you know, 55% of the response from 35% of the. Of the homes. So I think, I think we were in like, I don't even know, like call it 20 subdivisions. And I think we're cutting it down to like seven or something. The most active. And the key with Listing grabber is that every lead that registers on the site, they want you to hand deliver a packet, which we didn't do. And they sort of blamed us that that was the reason why we didn't have the response that we should have. The cool thing about Listing grabber is that it's really turnkey. So I'm. I'm more attracted to stuff that's like super turnkey. It's not very like when you look at the postcards, they're not very sexy and they're not very like, oh man, this is great. They're very like. Dan Kennedy, direct response, no branding, yellow and black. Like it's just kind of harsh. But that's the stuff that works. So you got to be really understand the whole direct response deal. You're going to find people that are liking this system and they're getting it to work, but you've really got to follow their system to a T. Average clients typically spend 3 to 500. So they really are meant for smaller agents. If you want to try one or two or three subdivisions, this is a good way to do it. But you're going to want to follow their system to a T. And their deal is that there's no way. I talked to the owner of the company. He said there's no way it won't work. His mission in life is to get geographic farming predictably to work. Then they have an authority series that we're testing with them. This is one thing that I think there are other things you should be real deep on your 60 touch. You should be I would say doing expired and FSBOS first farming comes really later. And you should be doing the seller lead gen email to your buyer leads. So that's geographic farming. And then there's stuff I'll cover digital farming that you could do to supplement as you're getting some traction to supplement geographic farming.
