View From The Top: Industry Leaders Speak Out

Actually, the title of this column is a bit misleading. Recognizing your niche, the segment of the real estate market that reflects your personal demographics, is easy. In fact, it is where most of us who entered the business as sales associates began to network and build a roster of clients in our communities. We served customers whose situation in life quite naturally matched up closely with our own.

For those of us who started in this business more years ago than we might care to admit, the market in which we closed our first transactions very likely had little to offer in the way of ethnic, racial or domestic diversity. As someone once explained to me, we believed we were looking through a window for our clients, when in fact we were looking in a mirror.

The face of the real estate industry closely echoes this perception. Witness the homogeneity of the population of real estate executives in America. It is largely middle class, middle age and male. As the first female to head a global real estate franchise, I hope that I am not merely the exception that proves the rule.

The upside of finding one’s customer base “in the mirror” is that it offers a familiar starting point. In my experience, the downside of failing to move on from this view of the marketplace can significantly diminish opportunities for long-term success. In our search for marketing opportunities, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that there is a much bigger, richer and more diverse world out there than the one in which most of us entered our profession.

If we are to continue to grow as professionals and as a profession, Realtors must remind themselves to take a good long look out the window at the world at large. The diversity of our customer base has emerged more quickly than many Realtors may realize. In the year 2000, nearly 30 percent of the U.S. population was composed of African American, Hispanic, Asian/Pacific Islander and Native American residents.

Any Realtor who fails to aggressively market to these segments of our marketplace is letting a huge opportunity slip by. That begs the question of how to reach one’s target market. Here is another instance where looking to the familiar, to one’s favorite regional or national media outlet alone, will bring only limited results. Between broadcast, cable, Internet, wireless, print and other media, Realtors are confronted by a bewildering paradox of consolidation of outlets and market fragmentation.

Reaching niche markets demands finding the communication outlets that provide the members of each niche with a national voice. To cite just one example, the Univision TV network boasts a prime-time audience of more than 3.5 million (mostly Hispanic) viewers. And market diversity cuts in many ways. According to a NAR survey, single homebuyers accounted for more than 25 percent of home sales in 1999. Clearly any global real estate organization that can capture the attention and ultimately brand loyalty of significant market niches has found a sure-fire formula for success.

A glance out any window reveals that we are a nation of niches. Diversity is one of the greatest sources of strength in our country, and it can also be one of our industry’s greatest resources for continued growth and success.

Brenda W. Casserly is the president and chief operating officer of ERA Franchise Systems, Inc.