It's human nature to congregate, to want to build business with people "like us." But real estate agents should be leading experts in diversity by making themselves familiar with all kinds of buyers, sellers and types of homes.

While most real estate agents are Baby Boomers over 50, married, with children, and living on dual incomes, the rest of the world has different lifestyles.

For example, single-family homes are still regarded as the gold standard of real estate, but there may be better opportunities in housing for singles, nontraditional families, couples without children, retirees, and others in other types of housing such as condominiums or zero-lot-line homes.

Only 25 percent of the homebuying public is married with children at home, according to the National Association of Realtors, yet a majority of real estate agents, builders, developers and tax authorities pursue this segment while ignoring the untapped wealth and needs in other demographics.

Single-family homes are great for many people, but not everyone, and the proof of this is the outstanding comeback condominiums have made over the last couple of years -- outpacing family homes in terms of appreciation. This has taken the real estate industry by surprise, but knowledge doesn't become power until the industry takes this new information and does something constructive with it -- like train its agents to sell properties that are under homeowner association, hotel, or community management.

Neighborhoods can be made or broken by the real estate community.

One way that real estate agents do this is to canonize one area while stigmatizing another. This tendency can push prices up in some areas while causing them to drop, due to seller desperation, in other areas. This reduces the likelihood that buyers will make out as well as previous sellers when it's time for them to sell their homes. It also means that the real estate agent's clients aren't going to do as well as others with more imagination, grit, and the elbow grease to go into a less desirable neighborhood and help turn it around.

While young families are interested in schools, older families might be interested in cultural, walking and business opportunities. That's why agents are wrong when they stigmatize an area as “no good” or insist that a type of property that they aren't familiar with, like a condo, is a poor investment. If they steer prospects away, and then the no-good area or condo becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy - no good.

What happens is that the industry may be training buyers to pay more for their homes because they are paying others for their success, not leading the way themselves for greater equity and profits.

One day, usually a developer, builder, or other entrepreneur decides not to listen to the real estate “experts” and they find or create new neighborhoods, leaving the real estate agents in the dust.

Why not train agents instead to find opportunities for builders and developers?

In New York City, real estate brokers have recently reversed themselves. They avoided taking listings on one-bedroom homes during the square-footage boom because there were too many on-hand to market. Guess what’s selling like hotcakes now?

One-bedrooms.

In a nation where condos are selling faster and appreciating faster than single-family homes, couldn’t they have predicted that rising prices would eventually make smaller properties more desirable? Now, in some areas of Manhattan, for example, one-bedrooms are priced at a premium.

Why? Demographics change and so do opportunities. When affordability, density or market-driven pricing becomes an issue, a smaller property might have more appeal to buyers. A run-down home in a middling neighborhood near public transportation can be the next hot makeover bargain. That's better than encouraging a buyer to sit on the sidelines waiting for interest rates to drop so he/she can afford that "neighborhood with the schools." That day will come a lot faster if they are already in an appreciating property.

A neighborhood with a reputation for squalor can generate huge buzz with buyers through concerted renewal efforts by existing homeowners and developers.

Brokers who are busy trashing an affordable property or area could have been getting those first-time buyers, singles and second-home buyers into those stagnant one-bedrooms and iffy neighborhoods, but they don't because they don’t study their own markets. They follow instead of lead -- a mistake you’re not going to make.

Keep in mind, nobody ever got rich paying others for their risk-taking.

Can you do that? It all depends on your tolerance for risk. Watch the cost per square foot of housing and it’s easy to see where the trends are going. Ask yourself -- why is there suddenly a market for one bedrooms? Why are people returning to the inner city they once fled? Why is CVS or Walgreen’s building a store there? What else is happening?

People, tastes and needs change. For example, the U.S. Census says that young single homebuyers are the fastest-growing segment. Homeowners younger than 25 have doubled over the last 10 years to 1.64 million from 807,000. but they aren't all moving to suburbia.

That’s not so surprising when you consider the relaxed lending standards of today. The opportunity is available for young people to invest in housing who were shut out or delayed a generation ago when lenders stuck closely to the 20 percent down rule.

What you’re seeing when you see a neighborhood start to boom is other people recognizing opportunity. The only way you would get in on the ground floor, pardon the pun, is if you are the one doing the highest-risk renovating or building. The ones who come afterward make less, but their risk is also lower.

That’s a large part of what people pay for in a neighborhood -- risk mitigation. They want to improve the risks that their children will go to a “good” school, so they pay more for the sure thing -- a more exclusive neighborhood. They want assurance that their home will sell, so they buy in an established neighborhood. They want to minimize maintenance chores, so they buy a townhome or condo.

It’s reasonable to assume that a once-hot neighborhood might not stay hot, because people are migratory by nature. They will always be looking for the next best thing, so for investment’s sake, staying put might be a good idea, but so is pulling up stakes occasionally. Most people will move in and out of as many as four or more homes in a lifetime (every 7 to 10 years, for most homeowners,) when previous generations not only lived and retired in one home, that home may have been passed down through the generations.

If you are a real estate agent, don’t ever allow yourself to disparage a type of home or a home’s location. The truth is there are only areas that have been discovered, recovered or neglected, and markets are made or broken on the way to fame or oblivion. Sellers aren’t paying you because it’s easy to sell their homes for them, and buyers aren’t paying you to steer them to more expensive properties. And nobody’s paying you to steer people away from their homes for sale.

Be a leader and create your own market by being the first to see the possibilities in a down-trodden neighborhood.