Real estate, no doubt, is one of the best if not the investment option an individual can invest in. Buying shares in a company, your dividends are based on the performance of the company at the end of the year. Investing in Cryptocurrency takes a lot of patience, and studying the market and you can watch the huge amount of money invested into it reduced to nothing, increase, and before you blink, it’s nothing again. This is so because the Crypto market is unstable. Likewise investment in Oil and Gas. Although investment in Oil and Gas is a bit on the stable side when you view it from the last gain point. It is also on the rising and falling side which at times affects the price. The hoarding of it is another issue that needs attention.
This series is basically for those in the real estate sector or those who are planning to go into it and need to learn more about the marketing before venturing into it. The series, in no particular order will come in six parts which will cover virtually all areas that you need to know to make your real estate company outstanding. This first series is about Real Estate Marketing.
However, real estate is an investment whose profit is not fixed. You can purchase land or landed property for $500 today and you decide to sell it, let us say a year later the same property is sold at $2500. Real estate yields more profit with time and it is more stable, your land is not moving nor is it going anywhere. You can travel out of the country and still come back to see your land or landed property where you left it increasing in worth. With proper documentation (we will talk about that in the next episode) you rest assured you have an increasing profit investment that can serve you during your lifetime and even leave for your offspring.
However, it should be noted that the real estate market is a broad one and it encapsulates a lot of things. Briefly, we have a study of some of the areas of real estate and from the study, you can choose the one you want to invest in or even get to know the actual one you are already into.
- Construction
This is the type of real estate that is concerned with the construction and erection of different edifices either for commercial, residential, or mixed purposes use. This aspect, apart from the appreciation of the location of the land where the construction would be done, the edifices erected on the land add to the appreciation of the property. For example, the Maitama area of Abuja, the Federal Capital Territory of Nigeria is a high-priced location and you can not get a plot of land for anything less than $200,000. You cannot say because you are the owner of your property and decide to erect a bungalow or ‘face me, I face you’ on the property. Purchasing land there, your plan is approved, and given the type of structure that you can erect there. In an area like this, both the location and type of edifice add to the appreciation of the property.
- Management
I remember when I was in University, I was involved in this type of real estate. I even added painting and arrangement of properties for the students. Now, management in real estate is often taken as Real estate Agents. It is a way of overseeing the affairs of a property at an agreed fee and reverting to the actual owner. In my case, the environment has different hostels for students. I made sure any student that contacted me in need of a hostel gets the worth of their money and the hostel they subscribe to is fit to their taste. You have an agreement with the owner of the property that on each tenant, you have a certain percentage you will collect and you remit the rest to the owner. Another way of making money as a Real estate Agent is through the sales of forms and inspection fees that the prospective tenants will pay.
- Consulting
In this type of real estate, you are not directly involved in the construction of properties. You serve as an intermediary between Contractors and Investors. Contractors will register themselves with you or agree with you at an agreed fee so that you can recommend them to Investors that come to you seeking companies or persons that could render the service they need to erect their structures.
On the other hand, you can be a Real estate Consulting firm or personnel and be indirectly involved in the construction of a property. You can be a Consulting firm that has Contractors registered with you and you have land of your own that you want to develop. You let these Contractors handle the project while you get yourself busy with maybe the marketing of the property or any other business of yours.
- Hospitality
This type of real estate has more to do with finished and empty properties. In the latter part of the first half of this year, a colleague told me of a friend of his that his employer permitted him to stay in his 5 Bedroom Duplex here In Abuja because the man and his family are based in another state of the country. The employer even told him that if the fuel in the generator and cable TV gets exhausted, he should put him on notice and he will send him money to re-subscribe.
This is just an example of a person I heard of and you can agree with me that in your locality there are empty houses in which the owner has another property elsewhere. Some of these property owners just got these properties to tie their money down with something they can always see or use anytime they or anyone is known to them is within the location of the empty property.
Now, to keep these properties in use, the owner can go into deciding to go into hospitality and use them for private hotels, get them registered on Airbnb or go corporate, incorporate a hospitality company, create a website of their own, employ one of two persons and start using the property(s) for short let whereby you can make at least $200 every week on each room in the property and from there, those with empty and vacant properties will register their properties with you for short let at an agreed fee.
It should, however, be noted that the areas listed and discussed above are not the only areas in real estate but they were picked because they are the most common ones which even a layman can easily liaise with.
On the other hand, Social media through its invention more than thirty decades ago has been a great blessing to the human race. It has helped those who know its worth and how they maneuver through it to achieve things that others don’t or better put, have not achieved. Social media without a doubt has a lot of untapped fortunes for its users. As an example, I made my first $2000 through a writing competition I got to know about on social media, and also, the day I packed my stuff from school after my final exams, I got a content writing job with a company that till today, I have not even met the owner physically. I have seen and heard of people who met their spouses or business angels on social media. These examples were pinpointed so that you can know that social media has a lot to offer. Deals are created, executed, and completed on social media with account balance on the high side.
It will, however, be unethical of me to ignore the dark side of social media simply because it has been of benefit to me and some other people. Social media is a wild market filled with a lot of spammers and scammers who just want to make money out of people. To harness the good of social media, individuals need not be greedy, or anxious to make quick money because there is no quick money anywhere, not even with those that go into money rituals. Everything takes a gradual process for it to be achieved likewise making a fortune out of social media.
To use social media to your advantage as a player in real estate, you need not be tech-savvy, you need to know the right way and the right link which you can tap into and use to your advantage, and that exactly, is what this essay is about. The next things to be discussed are processes that I and some other persons have used, still using, and will use, which have, over time, proved productive.
- Instagram and Facebook Advert
Meta, the mother company for basically Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp has made it easy and possible for its users to advertise their goods and services for other users to see. These adverts and reach are so flexible that a particular advert can reach over a thousand users based on the duration you choose and the amount you are ready to pay. With this, those who are regular and new users of these Apps will get to see the properties you have, the prices, the location, and the features. Once it meets their fancy, they will chat you up. However, the person that saw the advert might not even be interested in the advert but once she hears people talking about something you advertised that she saw, she can easily refer the person(s) to your profile.
- Social media influencers
Let me start by saying anybody can be a social media influencer like the likes of MrBeast, ZHC, MrBro, Tundeednut, and Ovation, etc. just that it takes a lot of time, dedication, and undoubtedly creativity to get that done. You have to dedicate your whole life to it to be relevant as a social media influencer.
A Social Media Influencer is a content creator who constantly releases content on their profile for the consumption of their followers and/or subscribers. They creatively keep their followers and subscribers glued to their profiles with their content. They are at times referred to as social media marketers because once you engage their services, they will create content about your product in a way that will catch the attention of their followers and subscribers and they will just want to patronize your business. As a real estate player, engaging the services of a social media influencer on any of your properties, you are bringing both your brand and properties to the attention of these social media influencers’ followers. Just imagine that your property is talked about by MrBeast in one of his videos on YouTube with over 100M Subscribers and tell me if you people would not want to patronize you or have Tundeednut with well over 10M Followers on Instagram make a post of your property. Having your property on any good and well-celebrated social media influencer will surely give your property a boost.
- Website
As a corporate or a business entity, it is expected that you have a website that your prospective clients can go to and easily check your profile and what you do without you being there to educate them about what you do. As a real estate company or profile, it is required that you have a website that people can easily assess. Talking about websites here, it does not necessarily mean that you should use the classic website used by well-established persons or incorporations. You can use blogs and if you are financially stable enough, you can engage the services of a programmer to construct a website for you. Also, there are some templated, mildly affordable domains that you can go to, create and launch a website for yourself within an hour or two. Although the address of the website, if you use the domains, may not generically be yours in the meantime, you have a platform where people can access your profile and learn more about you and your brand. Some of these domains which I know of and I have perused and seen people use are GoDaddy.com and wix.com. You can check them out and try your hand at some of their features, all things being equal.
I hope you have learnt one or two things from this series on how you can perfectly both your real estate company and the products you have for sale and those to come. See you in the next series.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Adebola Valentine Adeleye Esq. is a Real Estate Lawyer and has keen passion and interest in Corporate and Commercial practice. He is based in Abuja and can be reached through adeleyebola93@gmail.com or 08108173996