Community engagement is often touted as a key component of success as a real estate agent, but can be easily forgotten about during busy periods. Continuing to ensure that you are actively and enthusiastically supporting your community may help to keep you front of mind during the quieter months of the year.
While this is one clear benefit for keeping engaged with your community, community engagement can reward agents throughout the year, and we have listed some of the benefits of keeping engaged with your community throughout the year.
- Customer loyalty: simply put, consumers prefer to hire businesses that are community orientated through activities like sponsoring youth basketball teams. Although people may place this with other, more frequently utilised products, it is still possible to build customer loyalty with your customers as a real estate agent. In a study conducted, researchers showed community engagement created powerful loyalty when service offering matched participant's core values;
- Brand equity: the same study also found that consumers are willing to pay slightly higher prices to interact with businesses that are involved with the community. Strategies like this may help ensure you are able to stay competitive, and still return a profit;
- Competition: in a highly competitive market such as real estate, the smallest actions will often make the largest impacts, and community engagement could be this small action. Community engagement doesn't necessarily need to mean sponsoring a local club, it could be something as simple and rewarding as coaching a local sports team.
Try keeping engaged with your community this summer and you may be surprised at the results.