What Should a Real Estate Sales Professional be Highlighting About a Neighbourhood?

It may seem like there is a simple answer to this question – everything is relevant of course – but the challenge is drilling down to learn what is relevant and your client won’t always be a huge help. Different things matter to different people about where they buy depending on why they are buying.

For example – someone purchasing a property as an investment and/or for income may want to confirm things like the number of owners vs. renters in a particular area, whereas someone who is starting a family and purchasing a first home may be interested in schools in the area and the number of young families.

Here is a short list of important neighbourhood demographics that your client may want to know about:

1.      Ages of people who live in a community

2.      Family types

3.      Marital statuses

4.      Averages ages of children

5.      Average incomes

6.      Religions and proportions of people in populations by religion

7.      Ethnicity and proportions of people by ethnicity

8.      Languages spoken

9.      Schools in the area

10.   Transit in the area

11.   Homeowners vs. renters

For some it may be easy to say that they would like to live in a community where there are young families, whereas it may be more personal to come out and say that they would like to live in a community that has a high population of other people from the same background as their own. As a real estate professional you may have to do a little digging.

Get to know your client! Taking the time and having a genuine interest in really getting to know your client will build trust and enable you to learn more about them and probe them for more information that will help you find them the perfect home.

A checklist/survey about a neighbourhood and who lives there is also a great tool for learning what your client is looking for in a community. You can leverage tools like Survey Monkey to create a brief questionnaire asking clients to indicate to you whether or not different information about a neighbourhood’s demographics are important to them. Leveraging technology to gather this information is better for you and more accessible for your client. After a client signs the agreement for you to represent them and you have gathered their basic information to get started, you can send them a link to gather more vital information about demographics that are important to your client.

A checklist or survey about your client is also useful when looking at demographics in neighbourhoods that you may present to your client. Do they have a mature family? How old are their kids? What type of professionals are they? Do they commute to work? What is the household income and number of people in the house? These are all important questions that can help you determine exactly what your client is looking for.

Once you know your client and what they are looking for, inside and out, leverage tools like GeoWarehouse (on desktop) and/or ViMO (on your tablet) to access and present vital neighbourhood demographics information to a client. The beauty of ViMO is that this can occur when on the road with a client so questions can be answered immediately.

Make sure that you are getting as much information from your client as possible, and using it to find them exactly what they want. ViMO can help you achieve this. Visit www.myvimo.ca.