What’s the next hot trend in real estate? According to Wendy Harris of Team Harris Real Estate, the answer is property management. “ As real estate started to rebound, you had a lot of investors come into the market and buy. But investors like to buy, not manage,” says Harris. “So handling the property management for them allows investors to get back to what they do best. Property management also gives us a tremendous opportunity to develop a long-term relationship with an investor, which can last up to 20 years or longer—this is golden.”
For more from Harris, including tips for building strong relationships, read the following interview.
Wendy Harris
Team Harris Real Estate
Years in real estate: 12
Region served: Fayetteville/Fort Bragg, N.C.
What’s the best way to market a home?
I make sure I focus on marketing strategies that generate phone calls. The best conversion rates are achieved through interactive voice response systems set up through 1-800 numbers. We want to funnel people to our phone numbers, and not necessarily to the website, so that we can have a conversation with them. I still believe that real estate is a relationship business—it’s not all about driving traffic to the website for us.
How do you advertise and promote your business?
We do very little actual advertising. That said, we have a moving van that serves as a moving billboard for us; it is very popular and great for branding. We also still run a page in a real estate magazine. I have to say that one thing that sets us apart from others in the market is that we travel to military installations around the country—Fort Bragg being the largest—meeting military people from all across the nation. If they are moving to Fort Bragg, chances are they remember us and we have started a relationship with them. But our bottom line is that we want to begin a relationship with them.
