Two subdivisions, a mile apart, both a little over eight hundred homes, both in the price band you work. Pull last year’s closed sales inside each boundary. The first sold forty-six. The second sold twenty-nine. Divide by the home count and the first turns over at 5.6 percent, the second at 3.5.
Every guide you will find on choosing a farm stops here and picks the first one. Five percent is the rule, the first clears it, the second does not, done. Now sort the forty-six sales by listing agent. Nineteen of them belong to one name, an agent who has mailed that subdivision for eleven years and whose sign is what the neighbors picture when they think of selling. Sort the twenty-nine. The busiest agent in the second subdivision closed three of them, and the rest are spread across twenty-two names, most of whom will never be back.
The rule picked the farm where two of every five listings are already spoken for and the incumbent’s share is still climbing. The farm it rejected has nobody in it. That is the whole problem with choosing by turnover alone, and it is why the decision needs four numbers rather than one.
The trouble with five percent
The five percent minimum gets repeated because it is easy, and it was reasonable when it was coined. It is less reasonable now. NAR counted 4.06 million existing-home sales in 2025 (NAR existing-home sales), against roughly 87 million owner-occupied units in the Census Bureau’s housing vacancy survey. That is a national turnover rate a little under 4.7 percent. A rule that rejects anything under five rejects the average American neighborhood, and by math it rejects something like half of all the neighborhoods you could pick.
The reason is tenure. Sellers in NAR’s 2025 Profile had owned their home for a median of eleven years before selling, the longest on record (NAR, 2025 Profile takeaways). People are staying put, turnover has drifted down with them, and a threshold written for a faster market now filters out perfectly workable farms while waving through the ones every incumbent already found.
Turnover still matters. It is the first of the four numbers, and the farm size math runs on it.
It is just the wrong place to stop.
The four numbers
Each one comes from data you already have access to, and pulling all four for a candidate boundary takes less than an hour.
Local turnover. Closed sales inside the boundary over the last twelve months, from the MLS, divided by the homes inside it, from the tax roll or a parcel count. Use two years if the boundary is small enough that one year is noisy. This tells you how many listings the farm produces for everyone, per year, which is the ceiling on what it can produce for you.
Incumbent share. Take those same closed sales and sort by listing agent. What share does the top name hold? What about the top three together? This is the number no guide asks you to pull, and it is the one that decides whether the farm is winnable in the timeframe you can afford. A farm where the top agent holds five percent of listings is open. A farm where one agent holds a quarter has an owner, and you are not choosing a farm so much as choosing a fight, with a competitor who has a decade’s head start on name recognition and a mailing list that is already clean.
Owner-occupancy. From the tax roll, the share of parcels where the mailing address matches the property address. Absentee owners do sell, and some of them are good listings, but they do not see your sign, do not meet you at the door, and receive your mail at an address in another city. A farm that is a third rentals is effectively a third smaller than its parcel count for every touch except the phone, and the phone numbers for absentee owners are the least reliable in the file.
Purchase-year cohort. Also from the tax roll: when did the current owners buy? Plot the last-sale years. A subdivision where most owners bought in the last three or four years will produce few listings for a while, because people who just moved in are years from median tenure. A subdivision where a large cohort bought nine to fourteen years ago is entering the window in which the median owner sells. This is the forward-looking number. Turnover tells you what the farm did last year; the cohort tells you what it is about to do.
| Criterion | Where to get it | What good looks like | Red flag |
|---|---|---|---|
| Local turnover | MLS closed sales in boundary / tax roll home count | At or near your market’s average, measured over one to two years | Well below the market, or a single year inflated by one new-construction phase |
| Incumbent share | MLS closed sales, sorted by listing agent | Top agent under a tenth of listings; no clear owner | One name on a quarter or more, especially if that share grew year over year |
| Owner-occupancy | Tax roll, mailing address equals situs | Three-quarters or higher | A third or more absentee |
| Purchase-year cohort | Tax roll, last sale date per parcel | A visible bulge of owners nine to fourteen years in | Most owners bought in the last four years |
Two constraints before any of that
The four numbers rank candidate farms. Two constraints eliminate them, and the elimination comes first.
The first is coverage. A farm you cannot physically be present in is a mailing list, and mailing lists do not become farms. If you cannot drive the streets in a few minutes from where you actually spend your days, cannot walk it on a Saturday, cannot show up at the community event, take it off the list regardless of what the numbers say. The size math also caps the home count you can touch on the plan you intend to run, and a boundary above that cap fails before it is scored.
The second is price. Multiply the median sale price in the boundary by your side of a typical commission and by the listings a realistic share would produce. If that number does not justify two years of mail, phone and time before the farm matures, the farm is a hobby. A high-turnover starter subdivision at a low price point can produce more listings and less income than a slower, pricier one next to it, and the guides that rank by turnover alone never show you that trade.
The order that works
Do not build a weighted score.
Weighted scores feel rigorous and they hide the one number that should have disqualified the farm outright. Run it as an elimination instead.
Start with every boundary you could plausibly cover and strike the ones you cannot be present in. Strike the ones where the income at a realistic share does not pay for the effort. Of what remains, strike any farm where one agent holds a quarter or more of the listings, unless you have a specific reason to believe that agent is leaving. Now rank the survivors by turnover times median price, and use the purchase-year cohort and the owner-occupancy share to break ties and to look two years ahead. The farm at the top of that list is very often not the one the five percent rule would have handed you, and it is almost always the one you can actually win.
Back to the two subdivisions
Run them through it.
Both are coverable and both are in the price band, so neither is eliminated on the constraints. The first fails at incumbent share: nineteen of forty-six is over forty percent to one agent, and the twenty-seven contested listings that remain are being fought over by everyone else who read the same guide. The second survives with a top share of three in twenty-nine, roughly a tenth, and nobody consistent behind it.
On turnover times price, the first still wins, and if you stopped there you would be back where the rule left you. So look at the cohort. If the second subdivision was built out in a wave twelve years ago, a large block of its owners is arriving at median tenure over the next three years, and its 3.5 percent is about to rise without anyone doing anything. If the first was built four years ago, its 5.6 percent was a burst of early movers and it is about to fall. Neither of those facts appears in a turnover rate, and both of them decide the next five years of the farm.
Pick the second. Size it by the math, build the roll from the tax record, buy the phone match, and start the touch plan with the knowledge that the first listing is a year or two out and the share you are building toward is one nobody currently holds. The difference between farming and circle prospecting is that the farm is a decision you live with, and a decision that large deserves more than one number and a rule of thumb somebody else wrote for a market that has since slowed down.