Hey there! Welcome to this exciting new video where I'll be sharing with you a tip that will make your agent's life much easier. My name is Ashley, and this is Agent Renovation, where we help you with systems and processes to gamify your real estate.

As a real estate agent, you've probably heard that you should analyze your competition, and today, I'm going to show you how to do just that. This is particularly important when it comes to farming and prospecting. If you're door-knocking, farming, or prospecting in a particular area, you want to know who else is doing the same thing in that area. This knowledge will give you a competitive advantage and help you craft a winning strategy.

When you're farming an area, you want to know who else is farming that same area. Other agents may be farming your same area in more traditional ways, meaning dropping off material and/or mailing flyers. So how do you know who your competition is?

An intelligence strategy and a pro tip here from a master of door knocking is to get the community working for you. Here's how we did it. As you've seen from our map and our team zones, we farm large areas, which means we farm different zones and pockets within specific neighborhoods. So what we did was we went to homeowners in the specific pockets of our farming zones and asked them to help us. We asked them, "Hey, do you mind helping support us? We're local, and we're trying to figure out who else is farming this area? Would you be able to collect all the mail you receive for real estate for us?"

And so we got to live with folders worth of marketing material. We enlisted the help of the homeowners in each of our farming zones and territories and asked for help. You always want to ask for help from the community. We're part of the community, and for that reason, our community wants to help support us, and we know that, so we don't feel bad asking for help.

When we approached the homeowners, we asked them to collect all the material and asked them to write on the material what day they received it. Now, if this seems like too much work for the person helping you, no big deal. Tell them just to throw it in a folder and deliver you the folder once in a while, or you can come to pick it up.

By asking the community to help us collect the mail for all of our farming zones, we now know which agents are farming which zones and which ones aren't. We also know which zones have new agents from either outside areas or new agents in the industry attempting to enter our farming zone. For instance, there are a couple of agents in here that are downtown agents. We're not a downtown area. So by our community helpers helping collect the flyers that are coming, we now know which downtown agents are attempting to break into our farming area. This gives us an advantage.

You may be wondering why you would want to know who's trying to break into your area. Well, for example, if an established downtown agent is attempting to market or move into our farming zone, maybe they've moved their family into this zone, maybe they decided they really liked this area and they want to add something to their territory. Again, by knowing that those agents are attempting to enter our farming zone, we can now be prepared. If we are in a listing presentation ahead of them, we can make the calculated gaps of who they're going to call to interview either beside us or against us.

Now, if you're also really attuned to paying attention to the finer details, you'll be able to over a period of time assess the marketing material coming from one specific agent that you're competing against. And when we say competing against.