Unless you narrow down the geographical range of where you intend to buy houses, you may be stuck in your car for hours each day driving from appointment to appointment. This really isn't a good use of time. We call this finding your "real sweet spot." You need to quickly identify those parts of town where you think you have the best chance of buying and selling houses. Sounds easy, right? It is, until you realize that while you put your office on the West Side of town because that was your planned target area, you now you find yourself making multiple trips every day to the East Side to see property! So plan on reevaluating every six months and adjusting your marketing accordingly. Here's what we did to give ourselves a strong start:
- Through trial and error we identified our "sweet spot" - what neighborhoods, zip codes, what kind of houses, and what range of values would resell quickly. This took six months.
- We made a commitment to be specific about where we wanted to work and seldom deviated to chase long shot deals in parts of town that were unfamiliar to us; and
- We held firm on costs, eschewing bolder forms of advertising like television, radio and billboards that would have flooded us with unqualified leads at steep price.
