The Long Tail of Your Local Real Estate Market

(Originally posted in 2/2009, I’m bringing this back home in an effort to consolidate my writings an thoughts. Lot’s of requests to repost this one…)

Borrowing heavily from of Chris Anderson’s seminal work, The Long Tail, I thought I’d take a shot at applying Long Tail concepts to local real estate markets from the perspective of a real estate agent looking to position herself in a competitive environment. This is what I came up with…

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I’d say the bottom line is something that most of us already know: A long-term focused effort on a single niche market can provide much more stable business with exponentially higher ROI than a scattershot approach will. Every effort, every success, every activity increases an agent’s visiblility and market command. And since it takes 6-9 impressions before most people start to take notice, an agent hasn’t got time to spare.

Of course, every market is different, so you’ll need to be the judge of whether it’s more likely that you’ll need to get 5% of a $40M neighborhood or 10% of a $20M community. In any case, you’ll probably not want to go head-to-head with area’s mega-agent with a monster budget. Don’t worry, with a little research, you should be able to find an undermarketed neighborhood that has enough charm, value, and turnover where you can quickly establish yourself as the best source of information and the trusted real estate resource for the community.

What do you think? Does this model fit with what you’ve seen?

Disclosure: Affiliate book links.