Whether you are a new agent wanting to break into the luxury market, or an experienced and successful luxury agent, it can be useful to identify your current competition and evaluate their strengths, weaknesses, and positioning relative to your own.
Not only is this useful in establishing your competitive advantage and positioning, it can also be a good way to identify what tools and tactics are working in today's market, and the agents with whom you need to be networking.
To identify your competitors, pull the listing and sales in the top price ranges for your market area(s) and see which brokerage firms and agents are most active. This will give you sense of the key players in the market as well as their relative market share. Calculating market share both by transactions sides and dollar volume can be useful too.
Knowing who your competition is isn't enough. You need to know what they are offering. Here are some questions to consider as you evaluate your competition:
- Is their market share increasing or decreasing?
- Are they targeting a particular niche?
- Do they have a clear strategy?
- What is their positioning?
- If they had a tagline or motto, what would it be?
- What three words best describe them?
- What are their strengths and weaknesses?
- What are doing well?
- What are they doing poorly (and does it matter)?
- What marketing tools and tactics are they using and what is most effective for them?
- What do their websites and marketing materials look like?
Of course you will also want to evaluate your own competitive positioning on a regular basis.
