Conventional sales wisdom says it’s best to be a generalist and serve large markets.  The thinking is if you restrict yourself to smaller markets, you’ll have fewer opportunities because they’re smaller markets.  In fact, the opposite is true.  You’ll have more opportunities by specializing in a few or even one small market than large markets.  Here’s why.

Specialization Breeds Excellence

You cannot be all things to all people in any walk of life.  The more things you try to be, the weaker you’ll be at all of them.  But the fewer things you focus on, the more you’ll excel at any one of them.  Focus on one thing and you’ll become a master of it.  The more you master a single thing, the more you’ll become known for it.

There are literally thousands of real estate professionals in any large city (eg. Toronto) who, when asked what geographic areas they work in, will tell you they handle listings in that large, multi-million population city and perhaps even several other smaller nearby suburban areas.  All of their branding (print ads, website, etc.) reflects this.  On the surface, there is little to distinguish any of the these people from one another in terms of “who’s better, who’s best”.

Now consider a real estate professional who takes the exact opposite approach.  They focus on a single market of only several thousand or even several hundred homes.  It could be a single neighborhood or just a few condos in a certain area.  There will be few (if any) other real estate professionals claiming specialization in such a narrow market, so when it comes to first impressions in advertising with prospects, they beat competitors almost by default.

Let’s say you’re a home seller and you’re looking through a real estate magazine with ads for your region.  You’re looking for someone to sell your home located in XYZ neighborhood.  Let’s say there were 30 real estate professionals with full page ads, 29 of whom claimed to serve the big city and 1-3 bedroom communities nearby.  A single ad said the professional specialized in XYZ neighborhood listings.  If you were the seller living in that neighborhood, who would you call first?

I’ll give an example of a real estate professional who specializes in a single neighborhood in Toronto.  This man has a website for virtually anything you’d want to know about the neighborhood.  There’s no other information portal on the web for this neighborhood, so he is ranked #1 in Google for anyone searching for this neighborhood.  This has undoubtedly helped him in his search engine ranking for real estate searches as he is also ranked #1 for real estate searches for this neighborhood.  He is the top producing agent for this neighborhood for the past 10 years.

In my next article I’ll discuss specific ways you can improve your branding by having it reflect your target markets.  Learn about how to get your real estate website high ranking in major search engines by taking my course Building Your Ecommerce Business.  This course has been approved by the Registrar, REBBA 2002 to qualify for 6 credits.