Every Listing You Market is an Audition for Your Next Listing

All of you want really great listing presentation tools, something that will help you get your next listing.  You want to know what the best tool you have is?  It’s the marketing you’re doing on your current listing.

Think of it this way: every listing you market is an audition for your next listing. If you do great listing marketing — if you take great photos or get professional photography, if you make a quality listing video, if you write good marketing copy in your property description — then the only thing you need on your next listing presentation is a laptop or a tablet where you can show your next seller what you did for your current seller.

The marketing you do for your listings is the single best point of differentiation you could ask for. As you all know, the majority of listings in our market are poorly marketed. Agents take lousy pictures, or not enough of them.  They write marketing copy like they’re still limited by classified ad space restrictions.  They don’t know how to take videos.  But if you do all those things well, you can stand out.

Your current listing marketing is a great tool for any kind of presentation.  For example, the best way to convert an expired listing is to explain to the seller exactly why her home didn’t sell during her initial period.  The seller, of course, is afraid that it’s just the price, and the price might have something to do with it.  But the seller is also desperate for an alternative explanation, another reason why the home didn’t sell. If you can point to the lousy marketing that was provide by the last broker, being careful not to denigrate the broker but rather allowing the client to draw her own conclusions, then you have a clear edge in getting that re-list.

Most importantly, your listing marketing is a clear proxy for demonstrating the quality service you give.  Everyone on a listing appointment says that they give good service, but there’s no way for a seller to really test that except for LOOKING AT THE MARKETING YOU’RE ALREADY DOING.  In other words, a great marketing job on your listing is PROOF that you provide a good service experience, particularly when you can compare it to the competing broker who put up 8 desultory photos and a three-line description of her last listing.

Finally, what are we really talking about here?  Property marketing is probably the single most important service you provide to sellers  You need to be good at it.  And being good does not take much more effort or money or skill than being bad.  You just need a decent camera and a general sense of how to take a picture (or be willing to hire a professional), the diligence to sit down and write a decent description of the property, and the motivation to learn how to take and edit a simple 90-second video.

This is one of those cases where doing a good job requires just a little more work than doing a mediocre job.  But the benefits of doing a good job are tremendous, not just for getting that listing sold but helping you get your next one.