when to widen your market

[Jason Malabute]

I recently filtered out a few markets I was interested in. I must say that it’s after a thorough Market Research that I turned away from them. Though it seems like I might have turned down an opportunity, it’s a blessing in disguise!

Additionally, it has also let me focus more on the markets I am looking at, making me more familiar with them. With my current market, I am determined to have a solid understanding of:

• Which owners will not sell
• Which owners will consider selling
• Which owners will surely sell

So, instead of widening my market and increasing the prospect pipeline, I have decided to go in as deep as I can into the current one. By going “Deep”, I mean talking to as many of the decision-makers in your prospect as possible.

Now, many investors only cover about 50% of the decision-makers in their leads before widening the criteria. By widening the deal criteria, I mean adding a new market to your list or increasing the unit size criteria to increase the deal leads.

However, I like to stretch it a bit further and my goal is to talk to 75% of the lead decision-makers before widening our criteria. Besides, having lesser than 100 leads is not anything to worry about! If you manage to talk to as many of your leads as possible, you may develop some quality connections and add value to your business!

This being said, the owners will recall your name before anyone else’s when they are ready to sell! Certainly, real estate is all about connections and relationships. So, build as many relations as possible and understand the pain points of sellers.

Conclusively, we should widen our market when we have dived in deep into the current one first and have developed some quality relations!