There is nothing more important in real estate than the listing presentation. It is the single most important place where you position yourself as the prize, not the contestant. If you want to convert new clients predictably and sustainably, the listing presentation is the first place to start.
What is that old saying? If you own the listings, you own the market.
Design
Design is so important in a listing presentation. Too often we see someone’s logo dropped on top of a template. Yuck.
You need to begin with your brand’s style guide. If you are a franchise, you know what a style guide is. The style guide outlines the colors and fonts of your brand along with the rules and guidelines for the composition, design, and congruent thematic look-and-feel.
If you don’t have a franchise, give us a call and we can connect you with a designer to build one affordably. We are not a design agency, but we manage branding projects (Remember, Marilyn was the EVP Marketing for Fisher-Price for a decade, one of the most iconic brands in the world, call her).
If you think of a recognizable brand, chances are that you learned to recognize that brand because every time you s
ee it, it looks consistent. The colors are the same, and while not rigid, its familiar.
Brand Language
Are you familiar with word clouds? There is a really cool little website that allows you to paste in all of the words of an article and get a word cloud that shows you the most used words that are in that article.
If you want to try something interesting, copy all of the words in your listing presentation and drop them in. The biggest words that appear are the ones that you use most to describe your brand.
Words are important! The ones that you choose will make a difference.
Incidentally, you need to consider your target audience when developing your listing presentation. You cannot have a listing presentation that talks over your client or under your client. Companies that really want to nail the listing presentation have versions for different listing price points, different property personas, and different customer personas. This is where WAV Group can really help.
The words that you use need to be carefully chosen to convey meaning in a natural way that your client will connect to. For example, terms like Net Proceeds and Profit and Loss may work well for business owners and executives, but not so well for a mechanic or service worker.
WAV Group Communications provides copywriters if you need help, reach out to Kevin Hawkins.
Imagery
It is a very practical choice to choose stock photography for curating images of your brand. We do it constantly. But for your brand, I recommend that you invest in professional photography or hold a photo contest. The important thing here is that you develop a library of images that are used to align with the area your customer lives in, and the persona.
If the family has children in high school, you may want to include an image from the football game with the high school logo, cheerleaders, player uniforms, etc. Collect photos of iconic places, shops, or geographical landmarks that everyone knows. These local images have a profound impact on your ability to communicate that you know the community.
A bit more on the photo contest. Contact a local school, college, or charity. Tell them that you are sponsoring a photography contest and will pay $1500 to the winners – $750 grand prize, $500 second place, and $250 for third place. Do this in all of the communities you serve. If your brokerage does not have that budget, talk to the agents. They will be happy to contribute if they are marketed on the contest promotion.
Make sure that the terms of the contest are that you own the photos. All copyright rights to use and repurpose the photos are yours. The National Association of REALTORS® has some good sample copyright agreements if you do not want to lawyer them yourself.
You will wind up with hundreds or thousands of images to choose from.
Train Your Agents
The agents you hire are the ones that communicate your brand. Do you know what they say? Have you looked at their listing presentation? Are they pulling a print out from the MLS? Do you track how many listing presentations each of your agents have each month? Unless you are an unusual real estate firm that focuses on the listing presentation as a center of excellence, the answer to these questions is usually no.
This needs to be a focus of your managers. The office manager needs to treat each agent as a member of their team. They need to focus on developing each agent’s skills. They need to meet with agents before their listing presentations to have the agent show them the presentation and deliver it to the manager. After awhile, the manager will gain confidence in the agent, and they only need to email the presentation for review before the customer meeting.
Agents will not like this at first. Nobody likes being held accountable. However, as the supervising broker, you are res
ponsible for all activities of your agent – especially the promises that they make to the customer during the listing presentation. A big part of the success of this program comes from helping agents curate their unique brand too – Their headshot, bio, etc. Remember, the customer is choosing them first, along with your brand.
Sign Here Press Hard
It seems like an obvious thing, but the end of the listing presentation is to ask for the business and start the listing agreement. You should have both the printed and electronic versions prepped and ready to go.
People who invite you into their home to discuss their most valuable asset are not there to waste your time. They invited you because they want to hire you, or they probably want to hire you.
Most people interview one agent. Those that interview more than one agent are uncertain for some reason. You need to train your agents that they need to assume that the information that they presented during the listing presentation is so good that the client would be foolish to hire anyone else – especially their second cousin who sells real estate part time.
Listing Presentation Technology
All of this work to tune your listing presentation will fail if you do not make it easy for agents to create the presentation. There are lots of CMA tools available in the industry today. Many times these tools are available through your franchise or MLS for free. Often you will need to pay a small premium to modify the stock templates to meet your brand design, language, and imagery. There are also a number of marketing solutions that can do the trick too.
The best solutions are data integrated, allowing the agent to select comps from the MLS. If you don’t feel like your firm has the right technology in place to deliver your curated listing presentation with a few clicks, reach out to David Gumpper or Victor Lund. You may want to appoint staff in each office to build listing presentations for agents as a service. If you are large enough, you may want to invest in a custom digital listing presentation product developed exclusively for your firm. It makes a great recruiting and retention tool.
