Key Questions for Effectively Mapping Your Market
This week, I will be examining how to effectively map your market and use it when your seller asks, “Who is going to buy my house?”
Key Questions for Effectively Mapping Your Market
To effectively map your market, you have to ask yourself a number of key questions:
- What are homes selling for per square foot?
- What are homes selling for as a percentage of their property tax assessment?
- What is the list to sales price ratio?
- What is going on in your marketplace?
- Who are the prevalent architects?
- Who is living there?
For example, in my marketplace, 85% of the buyers who earn over $1 million are typically from the financial services industry coming from inside the 495 belt as it wraps westward around the city of Boston.
Why Should You Market Map?
Mapping your market accomplishes two things:
First, it gives you a solid knowledge base that prospective clients will be expecting from you.
Second, it gives you something you can actually provide as a service to the gatekeepers of the wealthy individuals in your marketplace, leading to more visible listings and potentially more sales. That becomes a marketable area of expertise that you can provide to gatekeepers in your luxury market.
In addition, it also helps you to convey a compelling narrative about the market to the sellers.
For example, during listing presentations, the sellers will sometimes ask, “Who’s going to buy my house?” I often reply, “It’s going to be a couple in their upper 50s or early 60s. They’re going to live inside the 495 belt out of Boston. Their kids are going to be just leaving high school or in college. They’ve worked really hard to get to the point where they can afford a house like yours. In the course of doing that, they have missed some important family events, recitals, concerts, or gatherings. Your house is going to be the magnet that pulls that family back together. Your house is going to be the thing that makes everything okay and is going to really draw that family closer together again.”
With market mapping, you can provide a pretty accurate picture of their potential buyers. Often when I answer this question, the seller has tears in their eyes because I’m able to describe a potential narrative based on research and fact.
How Market Mapping Differentiates You
Telling a story about who’s going to buy the house, mentioning who the typical buyer might be, presenting your marketing plan, and identifying how you’re going to find that buyer are all part of how we differentiate ourselves with the marketplace because everybody else comes in and talks about it like it’s fishing. We’re not going to start casting lines out in the middle of the ocean of buyers and hope that one of them bites, like everyone else. With market mapping, we know their ideal affluent buyers are at the shore over there where the really big fish are and that’s where we’re going to cast our nets.
You can develop a buyer profile story for any market and it makes your marketing plan much more relevant and compelling. Click To Tweet Otherwise, you’re presenting a vague, generic marketing plan – just casting out your line into the universe and seeing what happens.
Until next time, make it a great week.
