Today on the Listing Agent Lifestyle podcast, we're talking with not one but two guests, Penny Alper and Kathy Falco, up in the North East, New York and New Jersey.
They've been thrust into the hotbed of what the media's calling 'the fleeing of people from New York' out to the suburbs. People who are scared to be in cities now and in condos starting a big migration to less densely populated areas.
This creates a great opportunity, and it just so happens that years ago, I created an opportunity outside of Toronto that would absolutely fit with what's going on today.
So in this episode, we talk all about how to position yourself, how to take advantage of this migration, and how to really get in the game as it unfolds.
This is a really interesting episode, with a lot of ideas to take away.
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Transcript: Listing Agent Lifestyle Ep114
Dean: Hello.
Penny: Good morning. Good afternoon. How are you?
Dean: I'm so good. Is that Penny?
Penny: Oh, yes, it is.
Dean: Well, well, well.
Kathleen: Hi, Dean. It's Kathleen.
Dean: What a treat. Hey, Kathleen, how are you?
Kathleen: Excellent.
Dean: So we're going to hatch an evil scheme today, I hear. This is good.
Kathleen: It's exciting.
Penny: We've been talking quite a bit between us, and we're swirling in a midst of oblivion. We seriously need your helicopter view.
Dean: Well, this is good. Let's start with, since we're doing this as a podcast, I'm going to have both of you introduce yourselves, so people know who we're talking to, and then we'll jump right in.
Penny: Okey dokey.
Dean: Penny, let's start with you.
Penny: My name is Penny. I am in New York State, pretty close to ground zero on this whole pandemic thing. So we've been shut down by order of the governor since March 21st, I believe. And so this is a absolutely perfect time for us to hatch an evil scheme.
Dean: That's exactly it. Are you still on shutdown, everything...
Penny: Yup. Yup, we're still on lockdown.
Dean: Still in quarantine?
Penny: There's three regions left in the state, that have not met the metrics and our region is one of them, along with Long Island and the five boroughs in the city. But we-
Dean: We're just opening back up here in Florida, everything is back on track, moving towards everybody getting out now and businesses opening, even if it's at smaller capacity, but we'll see how everybody does. I haven't had the observation of people really taking full social distancing precautions or anything like that. So we'll see whether that just sends us into another tailspin.
Kathleen, welcome to you.
Kathleen: Thank you. I'm Kathleen. I work for RE/MAX Select. I'm in New Jersey, so I'm in Bergen County, New Jersey, which is the bedroom community for the city.
Dean: I know all about it. I have a good friend from college who used to live in Park Ridge. I spent a lot of time in Bergen County, particularly at Kinchley's, is one of my-
Kathleen: My favorite.
Dean: The pizza at Kinchley's-
Kathleen: Absolutely. It's so good, thin crust-
Dean: Yes, I'm craving it.
Kathleen: The red and white tablecloth.
Dean: Yes.
Kathleen: I know it well. So we've been more fortunate-
Dean: Now that we've got that out of the way, tell us, what's been going on?
Kathleen: We've been more fortunate than New York. We can't do open houses, but we are able to show homes. We are able to list homes. So business is still continuing, figuring out new ways to create the business and to navigate through everything.
But it's been a good lesson, and I think it's a timely thing what we're talking about, because Jersey hopefully will be enticing some of the people that have been locked up in smaller quarters.
Dean: Bergen County is pretty close. Close to the parkway, so you're there. So, okay, let's talk about the opportunities then, let's talk about what's going on right now, because I know that this has been kind of stimulated from a conversation I had with Penny, about something that I did years ago in Toronto. And the time I think is perfectly suited for it.
I've just been reading the headlines. I don't know, Penny, whether you were on our GoGoAgent call yesterday, where I was reading some of the headlines about what's happening right now. And people fleeing to Connecticut, this was a Connecticut based thing, but they're fleeing to Connecticut to buy up all the suburban homes.
I think that you look at it right now, there's a lot of fear, there's a lot of transition. And people are fearful that if they get on an elevator in a building in Manhattan, that they are, all of a sudden it's not just one neighbor, it's the 400 or 500 people that maybe live in that building, that they're riding up and down in that elevator and it raises their chances. I think there's a lot of people that are fearful of that and will seek out refuge in the suburbs. So I think that's going to be a nice meta trend to take advantage of.
And one of the ways of doing that is aligning yourself with other people who are in the same vicinity kind of thing. Rather than trying to get people to exclusively consider Bergen County or New York State where you are, Penny, individually, the greatest thing that you can do is collectively find the people who are going to all be the beneficiaries of this.
Because sometimes people who are making the move, they don't know where specifically. They may have a certain affinity for Connecticut, because maybe they came from Connecticut and went there or they may be New Jersey centric, but there may be people who are open to all the possibilities, if they knew what the options were. And so I think there's a cool opportunity there.
Penny: Yeah, and we do too. After you and I had that conversation, I was just vibrating. I was just like, whoa, my head was like pop rocks. I hung up and I called Kathleen immediately and I said, oh, my God, we are so doing this.
We spent the past couple of weeks just doing a little brainstorming, trying to kind of figure it out, but we really wanted, look back at your Toronto and beyond thing and just see what that was. Is that anywhere that we can see it or...
Dean: Well, yeah, the funny thing is, I've got this room where I'm doing my podcasts here. And the thing to realize is that this was 1993, '94, '95, in that area, and there was no internet. And so what I'm talking about were physical guides that we created to where I lived.
I'm looking at, I have a little tickle trunk that I have here. So I'm looking at one of these directories here. And this is how Justin and I teamed up. This was something I had done for my local real estate business. I lived in an area called Halton Hills in Toronto, which was not unlike Connecticut to Toronto, there'd be people live in Halton Hills and commute to the city. And it was about 45 minutes on the train from Halton Hills, which was the end of the train line to the city.
But of course, there's no internet. So people didn't have any way to get information about what is in Halton Hills, unless you ride out there and take a look. And so I started realizing that there would be a neat opportunity for me to put together a guide to Halton Hills.
How that came about was, there was a lot of new construction going on in Halton Hills at the time. I used to love that, because I was young, I was new in real estate and as these things were happening, I used to love to go to the model homes and the new home centers and they would have these big pool table size topographical maps that showed the whole development, with the lots all plotted out. And how around the perimeter of the walls, they had elevation drawings of the models that you could build.
And at the same time, there was a lady in my office who was retiring, Barbara McIntyre, and she had been in real estate for 30 something years, from the 1960 to 1994 or something like that. And she had collected all of the new home development brochures and floor plans of all of the developments that had happened in Halton Hills, as long as she had been in real estate.
I grew up in a house that was built in 1970, this was a 25 year old house, and she had the new development kit from the brochure from my development. And it was just my aha, that all of these older houses there, they were all new homes at some point. And it dawned on me that we lived in a cardinal model and that there were other homes just like mine peppered throughout the whole neighborhood, and there were maybe a dozen models that they built.
And so you could see them all around. So I knew that if I just took pictures of each of the models, that that would give people a representation of what was available. I started driving around and looking around and I found that I could really give somebody a really good representation of what you get in Halton Hills in 60 pictures.
And so I took 60 different pictures of the kinds of models all the way from the smallest condos, apartments condos, to the townhouses, to the semi-detached or duplexes, to the small single family homes, all the way up to the four bedroom homes, up to the luxury homes. So you could give somebody a visual indication of the landscape of what you get in Halton Hills.
I would put price ranges on them, rather than say, I'm not showing them pictures of specific houses that are for sale. I was showing them pictures of the style of house and the price range that you would pay. Because I was already thinking ahead that I wanted the guide to be timeless. And so I put a legend, a pricing legend like you would see on a map, where I would have price ranges A, B, C, D, E, F, G.
That way, all I would have to do as prices adjusted, I would just adjust the prices of what the models were. So even if prices doubled over time, all I would have to do is just shift the range of what they were and I only had to change that one page of the guide. But I had a map in there, like a center spread map of Halton Hills, showed were different styles of homes were.
I started advertising that in a Toronto based homes magazine, that would have a section for Halton Hills and had sections for all the west... they had three different magazines. They had a northern suburbs, a western suburbs, an eastern suburbs. And so I would run in the western suburbs magazine, a full page ad, offering the guide to Halton Hills real estate prices.
And so it was specifically for people who were looking to move out to Halton Hills, and there's no internet. So I had a little coupon in the bottom of the ad that people could fill out their name and address and fax it in or mail it in to me, or they could call my recorded message and leave their information to get it.
And so I started running that and people would mail in the thing for the guide or call to get it. I would send them the guide, along with all the homes that were for sale right now in Halton Hills. And then every two weeks, I would send them a physical market watch mailing, with all of the new listings that had come on the market and a cover letter and some news from Halton Hills, to give people an idea of what was going on.
And that became just this machine that would be deliver three to five buyers a month, just like clockwork. It was such a amazing thing that was kind of freeing. And then I started then licensing that system to other agents around me who were in other areas. So I was in Halton Hills, but that was one of 40 communities that were all in a semi-circle around Toronto, with Lake Ontario of course on the south.
But the semi-circle would extend out for an hour in every direction. And that's about as far as people would commute to the city.
And so I did a guide called Toronto and Beyond, and it was 40 great places to live within an hour of the city. And we would advertise that in the bigger newspapers and in the regional ones as well. And then I would refer the leads to each of these 40 agents who were the licensees for that system.
So that was a great model. And that's right when I met Justin, and I came and started speaking about that, and marketing at the main event. So then we decided to take that, build up a coaching program around it. So the guide I'm looking at right now, I've got one for Dayton, Ohio, that we did with Pat Sherman back, it's got the date on the thing, copyright 1997. So that was well into what we were doing there.
But I'll tell you how difficult it was to create these, because there was no easy way to do desktop publishing and printing. We had to get photos and then create grayscale print ready photos and mock them up on sheets that we were going to then print. And it was quite a process. Of course, now you can set up one of these guides in an afternoon.
Penny: So, I have a question, Dean, way back in the Money Making website, the whole beginning of that, I set up a guide to Hudson Valley real estate prices. I have the guide. It encompasses, I think maybe 13 communities. Because when I first started, I had so many different areas that were part of what I was doing.
Is this what you're... [
Dean: That's exactly it. That's exactly. We took that same model, and then when it became... we're still doing it today. Literally, I talked about this on our GoGoAgent call yesterday. Let me just look right now. We're running a townhouse guide. And so we generated now 19 in the last... for a $62 ad spend, 19 townhouse buyer leads.
And that model now, combined with Facebook And, and how easy it is to put these together is an amazing thing. And it's the same principle, right?
Penny: It's so funny. I just got to my end page here, and it's 2005 I did this. 15 years ago. So now for me and Kath to team up on this and that's kind of our vision that we're going to do this as a joint venture here, are we still doing the houses for maybe five price ranges for 40 different areas?
Dean: Yes. Absolutely. Because what is somebody going to want to know, somebody who's moving out to a new area or considering an area? The first decision that they have to make is, well, where do we want to be? If they're thinking, I definitely want to get out of the city and they want to be, I don't want to be any more than an hour outside of the city or an hour and a half or whatever the thing is. How long is the commute from where you are, Penny, to the city?
Penny: Acceptable is 90 minutes.
Dean: Are you in an area?
Penny: Yeah, a lot of bedroom communities where I am, for sure.
Dean: Okay, perfect. And Kathleen, you're much closer than that.
Kathleen: Right. An hour, a little over, depending on where.
Dean: Yeah, perfect. So when you look at that, if you were to say, to just put a swath around Manhattan, if you look at the area there. Let's just go to the map. I'm going to look up Manhattan here and see what we're dealing with.
And so if I go there, that's all the way, though I know you're further out than Paramus, that's where that big mall was, the Paramus mall. So are you north, southeast or west? I don't really have a sense of direction around there. I see Paramus, but where-
Kathleen: Where my location is?
Dean: Yeah.
Kathleen: I'm in Franklin Lakes. So Paramus is 10, 15 minutes away from me, but Paramus is part of my territory.
Dean: Is Paramus east or west or north or south?
Kathleen: North.
Dean: Okay, so there you are. So there's Passaic. Okay, Garfield in that area.
So when I look at it, if I were to look at the area within, if I set your boundaries here, where would be the... if you just draw the line around that, if we draw the circle kind of thing, commuting to Manhattan, how far out could you go to the west would you say? Is Patterson still there? Or, is that too far? That'd be about the edge of it. Right?
Kathleen: There's certain towns that I think would be popular for New York, Summit, Chatham, Madison, Montclair, Ridgewood, Hogan, Glen Rock. The big commuter towns.
Dean: I think when you look at these things, when you start to look at these, part of the thing that we're looking for is to see which direction are people going to go? Are they going to go out on to Long Island, or are they going to go up into Connecticut or...
Penny: Some may look to Long Island. Long Island is almost like the sixth borough, kind of. They call the Long Island Expressway the world's biggest parking lot for a reason.
Dean: I bet. Exactly.
Penny: To drive 10 miles on Long Island can take you two hours. Whereas if you're going north, east or west, I think what we're looking at is New Jersey, perhaps into Connecticut.
And what we were talking about was also following the mass transit lines. So the train runs up the east bank of the Hudson.
Dean: There you go.
Penny: And it also, up by me, it shoots off toward the west. There's another branch that shoots off to the west. Kathleen has commuter trains that service her, as well as more buses than we do. We do have some buses that service us.
So that's what we were kind of thinking as a starting point, because a lot of people in New York don't even have cars, which blows my mind. So if we can look at that initially, I think that may help us maybe-
Dean: Is Poughkeepsie commutable, or is that too far?
Penny: Yeah, Poughkeepsie is at the very north end.
Dean: So that gives me a sense of scale. So if we take Poughkeepsie to Middletown down to Trenton, Princeton.
Penny: Princeton is kind of far. That's far, right Kath?
Kathleen: Yeah. Like the Madison Summit area. They have an advantage because the train line is faster.
Dean: I think there's an interesting thing that, if you look at, we did a thing, Tom Cook, remember Tom Cook?
Kathleen: Yeah.
Dean: Of course.
Kathleen: Absolutely.
Dean: We did a website and the guide on subway condos, that were condos within walking distance of each subway stop. So then you could see the ones that were clustered around there.
And that's an interesting thing. When you start looking at putting this guide together as answering the question of giving people options, as they're starting to research, maybe getting out of the city. I would look at doing this as something that you would run ads in Manhattan or tied in to Manhattan there, looking for people who are living there now but want to get out.
And the guide would be, maybe look at showing the map with a radius around it, and the offer of however many communities there are, that would be great places to live within an hour of Manhattan. That would be the model that I would look at.
Penny: And then the other thing we were wondering is, do we give little blurbs of what is differentiating about the community?
Dean: Yeah, that would be great. I think what you would ultimately want to have is somebody on the other end of each of those. If you look at it, that part of the collaboration is in having your syndicate of agents who are serving all of those communities. You guys have both been around long enough, you've probably got a really good network already, you probably know people in all of those areas, that you naturally refer people to anyway.
I think when you're just looking at divvying up the territory in a way that you serve the ones that you serve, and they serve the ones that they serve kind of thing, is a valuable opportunity.
Penny: So again, looking just at how this all works, the leads would funnel into us and we would refer them out. That's, the idea?
Dean: Yeah, you could do it that way. Or you could just put together a syndicate where you're splitting the cost of the leads, that you together run the ad, looking for people who want to live within an hour of the city, and you just split the cost of those leads. They're like co-registered leads in a way.
Penny: Okay, so everybody would essentially have to be in GoGo to have these leads funnel in from a landing page? Is that the-
Dean: That'd be a great thing. Because we've got the system for it.
Penny: And that's what we want to do, we want to work with what is already simple and plain. And get Stuart, go to work, build us a landing page is what would have to happen here. And just turn into a system that we turn on and you know me, set it and forget it. That's always the goal.
Dean: That's my favorite thing. Nothing gets you more excited than a good set it and forget it scheme.
Penny: Exactly, exactly. So we're just trying to wrap our heads around how we go from having nothing, to getting to the set it and forget it thing.
Dean: First step is to get the territory mapped out, to wrap your mind around where this is, right? So, get the map, draw the radius, start to divide up what the towns are. I would look at, if you look at markets that are more than then 20,000 people kind of thing, I would look at that as that's a name brand community. How many of those are in Bergen County, when you look at what are the things that...
Because they're all I know in both New York and New Jersey, they're all back to back to back. They're all bordering on each other. Now you're in here, now you're in here, welcome to here, so you're not separated by like you're driving into this town and now you're leaving it. Everything is there.
But when you look at it, how many communities would you have, do you cover all of Bergen County?
Kathleen: Yes and Passaic. I've actually recently sold some things in Morris, just because that's where they landed.
Dean: So if I look at Bergen County, New Jersey, and then I'll look at cities within there. Bergen County, New Jersey cities. How many are there? Hackensack, Paramus, Teaneck, Ridgewood. All those are there.
So when you start putting that together, I think that makes a good thing for you, if you got them by, there's a lot of them here. Do you guys work more by counties say? What would be a good way to divide it up without having it be too many?
Penny: And that's what we were spinning. For me in Orange County, Orange County is a huge geography. Then I also have Ulster County north of me, which I run the southern part of Ulster. I actually live on the county line.
So when I look at all those individual towns, I'm not necessarily thinking I have to deal with all those individual towns. I'm thinking let's find something almost iconic and then we can bleed into the surrounding areas, because they don't have anything else-
Dean: That's what I'm saying about the name brand ones, the ones that people would have heard or know the name, that they're-
Kathleen: Generally, that's the commuter towns.
Dean: There you go.
Kathleen: It would be Ridgewood, it would be Morristown, it'd be Montclair, those are like the heavy commuter towns I think that people will know about.
Dean: There you go.
Kathleen: And then I think what the question is, do we handpick those, I guess, instead of trying to do all of them?
Dean: Well, I think you can do anything you want, but to handpick them as a curated, 40 great places to live within an hour of Manhattan or whatever, that would be great. Or, that you wrap it around the commuter... Yeah, like you said, wherever the train goes, all the train stop communities there would be a good indication.
Kathleen: And then I also have the bus. I've got both. So some of the towns are close enough to commute by bus, or they have an alternative. They can go bus or they can go train. It's their decision. But there isn't actually a train line in that town, that they can drive to it.
Penny: Same here, because the train goes up the east bank of the river. And even though I'm on the west bank of the river, Orange County is on the west bank, people go to the train station. That's the huge deal. They go to the train station. So that could go in 20 miles in any direction to get to the train station.
Dean: I think that if you were to take on a simplified basis, how much of a variation would there be in the price of a two bedroom condo, in that one and a half hour range? A townhouse, a three bedroom townhouse, a single family home, a starter single family home, that you could get, and a four bedroom home that would be a typical American home kind of thing. That would be helpful for people to have some sort of comparison to see that, if I want to get a condo, I could get a condo here for this much.
We used to do things, where I was in Halton Hills, even in Halton Hills, which would be the end of the commuter line, we had homes that looked very similar. And if you look at Halton Hills in total, butt it on to the other areas that we served, Acton and Erin and Hillsborough, and you could have a home that was the same style in all of those places, but there would be a $20,000 difference in the house, if it was in Georgetown versus Hillsborough.
And we used to say to people like it was pretty much a rule of thumb, that you could save, and again, this was in the early '90s, but you could save $1,000 for every minute that you are willing to drive beyond the train station. So if you're willing to drive 20 minutes north of the train station, you could get a house for $20,000 less than what it could be in Georgetown.
And so it's what do you value more time or money? I imagine that there's quite a difference between, if you took a two bedroom condo at Grand Central Station, and you took that Grand Central Station direct line out to 90 minutes away east or west, that that condo is going to be a lot less expensive than the one in the city.
Penny: Absolutely.
Dean: And it'll be an interesting thing to know what that metric is. How much can you save, can you save... it's possible that you could save $2,000 a minute for every minute that you're willing to sit on the train.
Penny: And the way I always said, we have Exit 16 on the throughway, and we have Exit 17. And that's the other thing that, you talk to people around here, it's exits.
Kathleen: New Jersey it is, for sure.
Penny: Right. So the difference between Exit 16 and Exit 17 is about 15 minutes right on the throughway. We always tell people, it was $1,000 a minute coming north, that you would save. And so we were $15,000 to $20,000 different from just going down to that next exit below.
Dean: Perfect.
Penny: And that's the whole thing. Again, this is a helicopter view that we're trying to do. We're not trying to do a whole lot of detail. We're trying to do that up above, correct?
Dean: That's it. Yes. Because all we're trying to do is we're trying to get the people in Manhattan who are thinking I want to get out of the city, I don't want to be more than an hour and a half away. Probably I don't want to be more than an hour away. But they may stretch that out to an hour and a half maximum.
And you start to look at, what are we dealing with there? Where does that take us? How far up into Connecticut does that get? How far up into New York up the river does that get us, how far into New Jersey? How far south into Pennsylvania? That's what we're dealing with.
And that gives people a great, like anybody who's considering it, that's how they're going to start. They're starting to research their options, and all we're looking to do is turn those invisible prospects into visible prospects. There's no list we can get of people who are going to move out to the suburbs. But we can certainly do it that way.
Because then that starts people thinking, they may be thinking about it, but they don't know what they don't know yet, because maybe they've lived in the city for so long, that they don't even have a frame of reference for... They may think that there's cows out an hour [crosstalk 00:42:40].
Penny: I get that all the time. Don't give me cows.
Dean: Right, exactly. So that's the kind of thing that would work and then you need to start thinking about what would be those communities, start to put together your little syndicate of people for those areas. That way, together, you could contribute your part of the book, your part of the territory. To give your idea of here's what to compare. We've taken the price of a two bedroom condo, a townhouse, a detached starter home with a yard, a three bedroom home and a four bedroom home. Just to give people a comparison that this is what we're dealing with here, how you can compare the prices.
Penny: Okay, so it's price driven. Now, in the guide that I did before, I had maps of every community, is that-
Dean: That's great. Well, now you want to have people, you want to use that. We did the Toronto and beyond guide, that was a way of getting people who were considering somewhere in the suburbs, and then when they chose the suburb, then we would introduce them to our agent. And that agent would send them the specific guide for Oakville or the specific guide for Burlington
So if you run that thing, and then they say, oh, we want to be in Bergen County, so then Kathleen would send them the Bergen County guide, specifically.
Penny: Right, and I would have the Hudson Valley guide.
Dean: Yeah, right.
Penny: and somebody else could have the Douglas County, whatever. Okay, got it.
Dean: Exactly.
Kathleen: Easier to do it by county.
Penny: My county is just so huge, from one side of my town to the other is about an hour. So it's a very wide county. So pretty much I would go to middle of the county and that's essentially where the commuter area probably would be easiest.
Okay, now we do this, we get this all set up, then you guys, is this going to be an easy button thing where you guys can do-
Dean: It can be. Yeah, that's the thing. I think we'll probably best, as I'm listening to us evolve it right now, I think it would be best for us to get everybody together kind of thing, and then all collaborate on putting the whole thing together. Because certainly, we can do a lot of the stuff. I think we're going to have to set up some special infrastructure things for it.
But I think it can be a good model and we can document it as part of a little series here.
Penny: Yeah. And that's where Kathleen and I would freeze, we were talking about it yesterday. Like, no, no, no, no. If we had to do any of the technical part of it. It just wouldn't happen.
Dean: What I think would really help, what we need for you guys to do is to start at the top here, pick the areas, see what makes the most sense too, as far as how many communities we're dealing with, how far out can you go? Where does the commuting go? Where do the trains go? What can we wrap this around?
I think we're wrapping it, we're setting up the boundaries for it, which are that circle within an hour or an hour and a half of the city. And that will be the good thing. Then you want to wrap your mind around, who do we know? Who are the agents that we know in those areas, that would be the best ones to collaborate with on this? Because this could be something special.
Penny: And it can be just like an amazing network. I think, again, I think it'll be really fun. That's the other part of it, it's really exciting to think about using this.
Dean: Yeah. It's so on trend right now. If the headlines are all screaming that people are fleeing the cities then let's start building some safety nets for them.
Penny: Service them.
Dean: Yeah, we want them to start fleeing towards us. Right this way.
Penny: Go ahead, Kath.
Kathleen: Just to backtrack, the guides would be each of the towns though. You would divvy up the counties, but you would still do personal guides, like Mahwah, Kinchley, you just mentioned Kinchley, so you would add Kinchley... okay.
Dean: I would say that what we want is that once somebody is there, I think that the temptation is to cordon off as big a territory as you think you can handle kind of thing, right? Like that's the sense that you want to spread your arms as wide as you can, because you don't want to leave anything out.
But I think that what would be the best thing for you is to get a comfortable size area that would be your primary area, so that you're not going back and forth an hour each way or something. When I started doing this guide to Halton Hills, in the last years of me doing real estate, I had narrowed my focus so far down to what I called the island. It was just District 30 and 31, just the pure Halton Hills island, that Georgetown and the immediate surrounding areas.
I would never leave, and I started referring to other people in my office, even the things that were in the next district over. Even though it was certainly an area we could cover, I just started realizing that my time is the most valuable thing and I want to be most efficient with that. I could keep on top of that, because there's much more efficiency in keeping on top of all of the inventory in District 30 and 31 and all my activities there. It's very tight. There's very little switching costs, if I'm showing houses in this area or I'm listing homes in this particular area, I'm not having to now spend a lot of time in transition inefficiently, driving 30 minutes up to go to Caledon and then coming 30 minutes back to go 20 minutes south.
Focusing myself geographically is a very efficient thing and trying to dominate that area, as opposed to trying to get a little of the bigger territory. I want to get all of the smaller territory.
Penny: Great. And then the other thing, just to bring this around full circle is to increase our getting listing areas.
Dean: Yeah. Because now, that's exactly it. Now, what are people going to be looking for, what is it that they want to live in? And that's the thing, when you've got all that inventory, or all the people raising their hand anyway, that you've got this silent market inventory of people who are thinking about selling their house. Now, you've got your full market maker opportunities.
Kathleen: That's stage two.
Dean: Yeah, exactly. But baby steps, I think that you guys are on the right track. The first thing is, get out your circle, what do you call that? Your circumference drawer, what do you call that in geometry class?
Kathleen: Radius.
Dean: Your radius or your protractor.
Penny: I'm looking at a website that's called Big Radius Tool.
Dean: There you go.
Penny: It's a 75 mile radius for New York City, New York.
Dean: Yeah, I would do that radius from Grand Central Station, if that's where the hub of all the commuter trains come in to, and use that as your center point and go from there.
Penny: This is very cool. It just gave me an Excel spreadsheet.
Kathleen: Really?
Penny: It did. It really did. That's so funny.
Dean: Is this an online tool that you're using?
Penny: Yeah, yeah.
Dean: What's it called?
Penny: Hang on, let me go back to it. It was statsamerica.org/radius. I just put in New York as the center. I did a 75, I could have done 60, but I did 75 mile radius and it gives you everything in any direction. So it's going to give you the other boroughs, Jersey, and all that.
But then it says download county level detail data. And when you do that, it actually opens up an Excel spreadsheet.
Dean: That's great, there you go. So now you start looking for dividing that up or getting the highlights, highlighting the name brand towns or overlaying that with the commuter route. So get the commuter towns. That might be a really good place to start anyway, as a frame of reference for people. Because coming from the city, they're going to want to do the commuting.
So that might be a good reference point is that you've got somebody as, how many of those stations would be under your purview and who would be the agents that you would work with at the other station?
Penny: Exactly. And I think starting out, obviously, we're going to focus on us. And then we're going to begin to figure out that network, but time I think is really important right now. I think it's really important to get this launched as quickly as we can, because we're coming out of quarantine. We're also in a spring market that was never allowed to happen. So it's going to explode when it does.
I think the sooner we can get this up, and then tweak it, rather than try to make it perfect.
Dean: That's exactly right. I would say a good book for both of you to read right now as the guide of this is the Lean Startup. And that would be a good guidance for you. Because that shows that whole thing, it's about getting the minimum viable product. That's really what we're looking for.
Penny: I think you're absolutely right.
Dean: Yeah. It's all very exciting.
Penny: So action plan, moving forward.
Kathleen: Our action plan is to get the guides going.
Penny: Right. We get our -.
Dean: Don't worry about the guides yet. We got to get the lay of the land. We got to get the territory right, then we got to figure out how many communities are there, how many does it take to give you a real good reference of that? And then start putting, within your own network, the names of the people that you know that would serve those areas, if you've already got a network of those. And start identifying those people, people that you might want to team up with to make this all work.
And then we can talk about the guides, because then we can set up our-
Kathleen: Format?
Dean: Format. That's exactly right. Yeah, the template, we want it all to read as one thing. It's one series, so everybody's familiar with it.
Penny: This is going to be, I guess the goal is to do Facebook Ads within the [crosstalk 00:57:45], we direct them to a landing page that will do this and it will be 40, 75, whatever number that is, places, so far of the city.
When they click on that, they're not looking to choose an immediate area-
Dean: No, they're downloading the guide. So they're saying, yes, they're saying I'd like this guide. Now, once they've done that, now that's the basis for our communication with them. Then we engage in a dialogue with them.
Penny: And what area would be appropriate.
Dean: Exactly, we've got guides for all these things. Let me know where you're most interested. You can get an individual guide for all these areas.
Penny: Okay, so we're going to start out with big ones, with big geography and then if need a big geography, then you're going to go, we're going to farm you out to whomever with a smaller site.
Dean: Exactly.
Kathleen: It would be one landing page then with all the-
Dean: That's exactly right. Well, it's the one option is the only thing people are downloading is the guide to all the great places to live within an hour. Now, we would then have a landing page, yes, a drop down menu for all of the individual guides that they would want or radio buttons, so that they could say, this one, this one, this one. That kind of thing.
Penny: That's going to have to be like, I'm going to have to see that, because that's-
Dean: Listen, so I've been to this rodeo before. I know how the show goes.
Penny: We're just going to start with our little baby steps and then we're going to circle back. We're going to blow this up.
Dean: That's exactly right.
Kathleen: We can do this in a timely fashion.
Dean: All very exciting, as fast as you can go. The good news is you only have to do everything once, right? You only have to lay out the area once, you have to divide it up, you have to find your person.
Kathleen: Once we lay it out, send it to all those particular...
Dean: Right, then let's connect through Diane, and we'll build out a plan here. Now, you're getting me excited. I'm going to be on the -.
Penny: know, it's going to be fun.
Dean: This is good.
Penny: Like I said, we're vibrating, we're just like, oh my God, oh my God.
Dean: You're vibrating with excitement. That's right. I love it.
Kathleen: All right. We have a long weekend to work.
Dean: I got you guys. This is good.
Kathleen: Thank you.
Penny: Thank you so much, Dean.
Kathleen: Thank you so much, Dean. We really appreciate all your help. Thank you.
Dean: Okay, bye-bye.
Kathleen: Bye-bye. Take care.
Dean: And there we have it, another great episode. And if you'd like to continue the conversation, you can go to listingagentlifestyle.com, you can download a copy of the Listing Agent Lifestyle book, the manifesto that shares everything that we're talking about here and you can be a guest on the show, if you'd like to talk about how we can build a Listing Agent Lifestyle plan for your business. Just click on the be a guest link at listingagentlifestyle.com.
And if you'd like to join our community of people who are applying all of the things we talk about in the Listing Agent Lifestyle, come on over to gogoagent.com. It's where we've got all the programs, all the tools, everything you need to do get listings, to multiply your listings, to get referrals, convert leads and to find buyers. And you can get a free, truly free, no credit card required trial for 30 days at gogoagent.com. So come on over, and I will see you there.