FIND Tip #5 – Tracking Your Farm Results

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This is the final post in our series Farming Isn’t Dead.

Our final post in the series Farming Isn’t Dead (FIND for short) is all about tracking your farming efforts and progress to make sure that your farming efforts are profitable. Half the battle to successful farming is using techniques that work, and the only way to know if your technique is working is if you keep track of what you do and the results that came from your farming efforts.

There are many easy ways to keep track of your farming efforts. For the not-so-technological a simple notebook listing the date, what you did, and what responses came from it will work just fine. For those who love computers, there is Microsoft Excel or even Open Office, a free open source program that allows you to create spreadsheets to help you track your farm. You will want to write EVERYTHING that you do related to your farm. Keeping track of what your spend, who called you, and when will make it much easier to improve over the course of your farming.

Another thing you can do after you farm consistently for a few months is conduct a neighborhood Survey. After you’ve spent some time farming and the neighborhood residents are comfortable with you and know who you are, you could go door to door asking them to answer a few simple questions to help you serve them better. These questions will depend on what your motivation is and what promotions you’ve decided to execute, but could range anything from, “What would you like to see more of in our monthly newsletter?” to “When will you be thinking of selling your home?” You could opt to mail a survey, but even with return cards it is likely you will not receive as good of a response as you would by going door to door.

Now that you have a few ideas on how to track your farm, every few months you will want to take into consideration the number of listings and referrals you’ve gained from your farming efforts. If you are getting a referral or listing or call from your farm once or more a month, then your efforts are paying off, but you’ll want to continue to improve your efforts by targeting things your farm will find useful to increase this number. If after 6 months you haven’t had a single listing, but the cobrokes in your area do have listings in your farm, then you seriously need to reconsider what you are doing. Are you too pushy? Not consistent enough? Does the cobroke firm offer something you don’t but should?

Keeping track of everything related to your farming efforts and tracking your real estate farm will ensure that you only spend money on things that work, stay within budget, and will save you time by being organized.