Segment your market
Perhaps the most important step you can make in targeting the senior market is to do a good job assessing the senior opportunity within your farm/territory and identifying where the senior segment resides and what it looks like. Some pertinent questions to consider:
1. What is the “universe” of opportunity? This is impacted by the nature of your business. Do you focus on corporate accounts, open house, investors, buyers vs. sellers etc. Do you operate by the “three pillars of business” philosophy that Ernie Armijo discusses or something like it?
The best example of this is an agent totally committed to farming seven hours a day stating his total market is 9700 homes in half the city he lives in. His goal is to eventually work and dominate this geographic farm. He knows his main competitor dominates the other half of the city – his strategy is to be where his strongest competitor is not and to work to keep all other agents from finding success in "his turf".
2. What is my addressable market? This will be a subset of your universe of those clients you have not yet eliminated as immediate or even long term opportunities.
Our super-farmer agent has visited and accounted for 4700 homes in his farm. He keeps an excel spread sheet of clients that are interested and those that are not, how often and on what dates he’s knocked on their doors and dates/times sent or dropped of marketing material. He knows which homes are two story with senior residents and works to befriend even the most stubborn "agent haters" in his farm
3. Which homes in my market are seniors?
An average percentage of seniors in a given population is between 20 and 25%. So our agent likely has 900 to 1000 seniors in his farm.
Some indicators of senior homes and non-senior homes include:
- - RVs parked in the front or side many times indicate a retired occupant
- - A handicap ramp or sticker on a car may indicate a senior although not always the case
- - Signs of activity in the middle of the day - seniors are home while most other folks are at work
- - Older weathered basketball backboards indicate grown kids so could be a senior home
- - New basketball backboards are likely younger families
- - Ski-doos, ski-boats and other toys used by active adults usually indicate younger families
- - Children's toys indicate younger families (could be grandkids though)
- - Newspapers in front indicate a high probability of seniors. Non-seniors seldom subscribe to daily newspaper delivery these days
- - Corvettes are popular with seniors. If you see a Corvette parked outside prepare for a senior to answer the door.
Keep track of where you find seniors. Applying various strategies to the growing subset of your market you've identified and segmented as potential senior clients can make you a lot of money over the remainder of your real estate career.
