Excelling in a Second
Home Market

For our latest Keeping it Real episode, we assembled a panel of experts to discuss some of the unique challenges and differences when working in resort or second home markets.

In this article, we break down the best advice from that conversation, so you can start applying it today in your real estate business.

If you want Greg to teach you how his agents generate over 500 organic leads every month through Real Geeks, join his private coaching community at www.RGMastery.com for less than $200/mo.

What is Absentee Ownership?

While our three experts work in different markets (Greg's in Myrtle Beach, Susie's in the Ozarks Lake, and Marc's in Hollywood), they all have a significant number of out of state buyers who are looking to purchase a second home.

When we're working with people who might own these properties but don't live in them - we call these absentee owners.

And some of these, especially in Marc's case, are what we call partial absentee owners. This means that they'll live in this second home for certain months of the year, but not others.

Why should you care about these buyers? Because the secondary home market accounts for about 15 to 20% of all property sales.

What's more, as an industry, we're not taught how to care for it specifically. This means that there's an opportunity to excel as a real estate agent, by understanding the intricacies of this market.

Let's see how our three experts approach secondary home buyers and sellers, while keeping in mind Greg's primary characterization:

"The second home market is a discretionary product. It's like a boat: They want it, but they don't need it. So when things are going good, they buy bigger boats, and when things are not going well, they wish they hadn't bought a boat."

How to Find Absentee Owners

According to Greg, the main difference between marketing to primary home owners vs secondary home owners is how you pull the data.

In a primary market you can go to Cole Resource for instance, put in an address and you get everybody's names and contact information.

But if you did that in an absentee neighborhood or a condo building, you would get all the absentee information for the building. And because nobody lives there, it's rare that they'll answer the phone or respond to your emails if you contact them.

So you have to take an extra step:

You have to go to Courthouse Records, and you have to pull a csv file as if you were going to do a direct mail piece, and it will give you the actual address where they get their mail.

That's the actual address of your absentee owners, that you then need to populate with their email address and phone numbers.

Greg uses ExactDial to find the numbers from the csv file of the addresses.

"And you can do a lot with that data" he adds, "We do Facebook custom audiences for ads, etc. So we go way beyond the call" 

Moving Into a New Market

Susie admits that because her market has expanded so much, she's hitting states she didn't used to have to hit, and it's getting expensive.

Here's where Greg comes in with his 3-step approach for targetting a new market.

1. Move fast.
   When you move to a new market, you should make sure that within 30 days you have the phone number and email of every single owner, whether they have a condo, a lot, or a house.
   
   
2. Go granular.
   Instead of doing a One Size Fits All approach in terms of your messaging, you should be marketing individually to every single owner. You need to make sure that every dollar you spend is going to a documented property owner, and not to an area where you think property owners are gonna come from.
   
   
3. Create a "[Your Name] Show".
   Send a video once a month to a very targeted database of this out of state market about what's going on inside the market you're working in.
   In six months, every single person in that new area will know that you're the resource if they're looking to purchase in that second market.
   
   

Greg's Killer SEO Strategy

When asked about whether his leads have already made a decision on which area they want to buy a property from, Greg's answer is a definite yes.

But this is by design.

70% of Greg's leads come from SEO, because he build his website for that purpose.

How? By becoming the undeniable authority on the Myrtle Beach market.

Here's the thing: Greg's site has 1,000 condo building pages, and 1,000 neighborhood pages.

This means he's got at least 2,000 extremely targeted pages, with in-depth content about a very niche topic (a building or a neighborhood).

So, when people Google anything related to a condo or a neighborhood in Myrtle Beach, it's inevitable that Greg's site shows up.

In fact, for most of these keywords (search terms) people are looking for, related to Myrtle Beach, Greg's site usually appears in more than one of the first 10 results.

"I want the highest percentage of real estate in Google's results page for the keywords of my market" he says.

Susie's Nurturing Success

Now, Susie's the queen of nurturing. 

In fact, every month she gets at least 7 buyers who have been part of her email list for 3 or 4 years, receiving her emails for months and months. 

"They love my property updates. They feel I personally picked them out for them." she shares.

This probably has to do with the fact that many second home buyers are over 55 years old. So they might not be as familiar with (and resistant towards) automated campaigns.

On the other hand, Greg is not a fan of these automated campaigns that run for years.

"For our market, long term set it and forget it emails don't work anymore. We go for short, extremely relevant campaigns." he says.

So what he'll do is have an Advanced Search Filter for people who have been on his website but who haven't been active in the last 60 days.

Then, he'll have an agent call everybody in that filter and talk to them, to re-engage them.

And it's only after that call that he'll trigger a very short, 2-step campaign that's extremely relevant for the lead and the current state of the market.

And this campaign can be a simple video email plus a text message.

"This way, his emails are more relevant (because less time goes by), so we have less SPAM complaints, and therefore better deliverability."

Addressing Concerns in Second Home Markets

Marc shares that the differences in concerns between first home buyers vs second home buyers tend to come from the age of the buyers.

And because the second home market is primarily over 55 years old, buyers are not concerned about things like school areas.

Their needs are different. For example, right now, after the collapse of the surfside tower the laws have really changed and condos can't avoid inspections anymore. 

Because of this, some of the concerns from Marc's buyers are the fact that the HOA fees are going up drastically, which is true. 

In Greg's case, Myrtle Beach is a lower budget resort market. So Greg's clients ask questions related to renting this second property during the off season.

As for Susie, her leads are really into the "hustle" Instagram game. This means they're heavily influenced by online personalities who buy their dream home in the Ozarks and make a ton of money by renting it on the off season.

So managing expectations while helping her clients achieve similar outcomes is her main concern.

Greg believes that the best thing you can do as an agent is anticipate these questions, and position yourself as a trusted advisor for out of state buyers.

In your first conversation with them, you should ask:

• Has anyone explained to you about condo ownership, and what that means, and not only the process of purchasing, but the ins and outs of ownership over the long term?
  
  

Most buyers will say no. And then you can start educating them, so you create immediate trust and you start building immediate rapport.

Final Thoughts

And there you have it – those are some of the ways you can market to and approach buyers and sellers from a second home market.

Remember that this is just the tip of the iceberg.

If you want Greg to teach you his SEO secrets, and even go through and optimize your workflow, join his private coaching community at www.RGMastery.com for less than $200/mo.

🥂 To your success!