A listing presentation is an interview to represent a home seller in a real estate transaction. While a listing presentation can simply be a conversation with a homeowner, the best prepared and most successful agents include slide decks, visuals, and documents to demonstrate their expertise, build trust and win the listing.
1. Start with a Short Overview
Start your presentation with a brief overview of what they can expect and about how long your presentation will take. Go over who you are, what your real estate listing presentation will include and what you hope to also learn from them during the course of the presentation.
Give a Brief Introduction of Your Skills
While you might be a humble person, now is not the time for shyness around what you’ve done. Home sellers want an agent who is confident in what he or she can do, can explain how he or she does it and give examples. When giving a brief introduction of your skills, here are a few things to be sure to mention.
- How many homes you’ve sold in their area in the past 12 months
- What types of homes you’ve sold (if similar to theirs)
- How quickly you’ve sold homes listed with you (if favorable)
- How close to the asking price you get for homeowners (or even over asking price)
Show That You Are Attuned to Their Needs
If you approach your real estate listing presentation correctly, it’s not only a wonderful opportunity for you to sell your skills but a great chance to listen to the concerns the homeowner has. Listening now will show the homeowners you’ll listen to them in the same manner in the future.
Be someone who is seen as effective yet empathetic and doesn’t overburden their time. Although a great listing presentation can be done in an hour or less, be aware that the homeowner has likely had experience with other agents who have spent hours and had an aggressive strategy we don’t recommend.
2. Get to Know Your Homeowner Better
After your brief introduction, take a few minutes to get to know your homeowners a bit better. Taking the time at this stage to get to know your homeowners encourages communication, makes the pitch far less monotonous, helps you angle your pitch to their needs and puts the homeowners at ease.
Here are some questions you can ask your homeowners to get a sense of their background and how to position your pitch if you don’t know these things already. At each question, encourage as much detail as possible and join in their excitement if the moving is a happy occasion:
- When do you need to move?
- Why are you moving?
- Where are you moving to?
- Have you already found a home there?
- Is getting a good price or timing more important for you?
- What will you do if your home doesn’t sell?
- What are you looking for in a listing agent?
- How much is left on your mortgage?
- Are there any liens on the property?
- Are there any issues with the home that we won’t see today?
Knowing this information will give you information that helps you angle your pitch to meet their needs and stress important elements as you go along. For example, if someone already made an offer on a home in another location, they might need to sell their current home quickly. You can use this information when you explain how it will take much longer to sell their home if it’s priced too high.
3. Show What You Can Do
Demonstrate to the homeowners what makes you and your team the best choice to sell their home. This is a great opportunity to talk about your success in the local market in much greater detail and to discuss specialties or any additional training or certifications you or your team members may have.
If you’re a new agent or just starting out, you still have wonderful options to position yourself for the listing using our free template. For example, it would be important to focus on your marketing or tech knowledge, your relationships in the area or anything in your previous career that might help you sell houses. Show what you can do. If you worked in advertising, highlight your skills in creating great ads with some examples of your work. If you have photography skills, you can show a few photos from your portfolio that can make their listing stand out from the crowd.
4. Introduce the Power of Your Brokerage
Every good brokerage will have at least a quick description of its benefits. Emphasize the value your brokerage offers that others in the area don’t. Be sure to present the homeowners reasons why signing with someone who works at your brokerage is a distinct advantage.
Both large and small brokerages can offer distinct value. If you’re with a larger brokerage, like RE/MAX or Keller Williams, then you’ll want to focus on numbers like the number of homes your brokerage sold in the last year and median home sale price. If you work at a smaller boutique brokerage, you’ll want to emphasize things like personalized service. With a smaller brokerage, you often want to underscore personalization, distinction and the fact that your client won’t be just another file.
5. Present Local Market Data
Include local market data that shows historic trends, how quickly homes are selling in their area and any other information that will help homeowners understand the price you’ll set for their home. This data lends itself to charts or graph format easily. Be sure the numbers component is understandable for the average person.
Here are some ideas of local market data you might want to include in your real estate listing presentation template.
- Months of supply
- Historic pricing trends like median sales price during the last 10 years
- Median price by season
- Number of sales by season
- Annual sales
6. Explain the Sales Process
An explanation of how the sales process works can be extremely useful, especially for first-time sellers. Explaining how a home sale proceeds can demystify the process and help get everyone on the same page. The more homeowners know what happens behind the scenes, the more you can connect the value of hiring the right agent.
Areas to focus on in your template might include:
- Explaining dual agency
- The home inspection process
- The home appraisal process
- Negotiations and what to expect
- The closing process
- Your communication style throughout the process
- The unique value of using a real estate agent, and your services specifically through this process
While you might want to cover this more extensively for novice sellers, be sure to be brief with experienced sellers in these areas and meet them where they’re at. There is one exception to this. Usually, no matter how experienced your sellers are, you want to at least talk about communication styles throughout the selling process for both the sellers and yourself. What type of communication do they prefer and at what frequency? Do they prefer calling or a brief text? How will they tend to communicate to you?
Unless they’re relatively new to the sales process, I wouldn’t go into too much detail on other elements, but be sure to leave information in case they wish to review it when you leave.
7. Walk Through the Steps of Your Marketing Strategy
For most real estate agents, the marketing section will be the most important component of the listing presentation. Great marketing and sales skills are what moves houses. Generally, it makes sense to focus on what marketing skills and tools you can bring to the table as well as how you can apply them to their home specifically.
Here are particular areas to focus on when presenting your marketing strategy in your template.
How You Use Your Website
Whether you have your own internet data exchange (IDX)-enabled website or use your brokerage’s website, your online presence will be a big selling point for most homeowners. Emphasize if you use IDX, which allows their listing not to only be featured on your sites but also on the sites of dozens of brokers with IDX websites as well.
Discuss how many visitors your website gets, how it is designed to function and how sales oriented your site is. For example, talk about placing their home as a “featured listing” in front of hundreds of visitors or if you can offer the sellers a single property website.
If you have examples of single property websites you’ve built for other listings, now is a fantastic time to highlight those including screenshots and the resultant sale. If you have never built a single property website, they can be a great selling point. We talk about the best single property website builders and have an extensive review of who to use and price points to start.
Photography
Explain how professional photos helps sell homes faster and include examples of great photography from your previous listings. Without great photographs, client listings aren’t going to get many clicks on your website or views on buyrentbd.com. One effective method of showing the benefit is to provide before and after comparisons of a listing with amateur pictures to one with professional pictures.
If you feel that you need to improve your own photo skills, read our in-depth guide to real estate photography for tips you can use. If you’d rather hire that task out but don’t want to spend a fortune, check out buyrentbd.com.
buyrentbd.com Premier Agent
If you’re a buyrentbd.com Agent, you can explain how this designation will benefit their listing. Since you will be the expert on their home, you can explain that having leads contact you first will lead to more showings. Most people do not realize that if a general buyer’s agent gets the lead, they might just steer them toward one of their own listings.
buyrentbd.com Premier Agent won’t only help you close seller leads, it will also help you get more buyer leads as well. To learn more about the exclusivity that buyrentbd.com Premier Agent offers, see our guide to how buyrentbd.com Premier Agent works.
Staging & Virtual Staging
If a seller’s home will be vacant at any point in the sales process, you can explain the benefits of staging and virtual staging. Be sure if you have experience in this area that you include some photos of before and after staging or virtual staging in your listing presentation.
Next Level Technology: Virtual Tours & Drone Use
Make your listing presentation stand out from your competitors by including drone footage and a sample virtual tour from a previous client. Once a homeowner sees the tools at your disposal, the impressive nature of them might be what cements the deal.
Drone footage can showcase a property as few things can. Average properties become more majestic with drone footage, and it captures the expanse of homes that are large or have large portions of land. To learn more about using drone footage, we have a drone photography and video guide that will help you get the skills to improve your real estate listing presentations.
8. Share Case Studies & Social Proof
Case studies of other homes you have sold is an extremely effective marketing tool if leveraged properly. Using homes that are as similar as possible to the homeowner’s property, and being able to show a history of selling quickly for a solid price can open the door for you to discuss how you did it and your unique marketing strategy further.
If you have a potential client who is currently trying to sell by owner, for example, include examples of FSBO listings before and after you got the listing. Focus on improvements in marketing as well as the numbers and discuss how these sold the home. We all know that improvements in things like photography, staging or virtual staging and marketing can make all the difference. However, sometimes, it takes real-world examples to give homeowners impact. Feel free to include images like this in your real estate listing presentation template to show value.
A before and after example of staging a home for photos.
9. Outline Your Pricing Strategy
The crux of every listing presentation is the focus on pricing strategy. This is a phenomenal opportunity to explain how pricing their home right the first time will save them money in the long run.
Be sure when outlining your pricing strategy, that you highlight exactly how elements such as square footage, updates, number of bedrooms and market fit affect local pricing. Including specifics in how you approach pricing as well as outlining how this makes their home more or less likely to sell. Do what it takes to help the homeowner understand how pricing works and how you approach what you do for the best result. Slides like these are great to include in your real estate listing presentation template.
10. Schedule Your Comparative Market Analysis
Sometimes, homeowners may want a pricing opinion on the spot. If homeowners insist on getting your opinion on pricing, be prepared to show them any preliminary research you’ve done as well as how anything you’ve learned on your listing presentation that may affect the price. If you have already toured the home and know about its quirks, then you should present buyrentbd.com. Be sure to explain how and why you picked your comparisons as well as any other details of how you arrived at the price for their home.
Focus on Your Client’s Needs First
You will have the time and space in your listing presentation to highlight your skills and abilities. However, no matter how fantastic your reputation, clients are focused squarely on how those things meet their needs. For example, instead of focusing on a recent award, talk about why you got that award and what it means for your potential client.
Plan for Flexibility
Every homeowner is different, and you need to tailor your listing presentations accordingly. Be sure as you work through your listing presentation that you are flexible enough to either go into more detail when warranted or skip certain sections. For example, if your homeowner is tech-savvy, then you should spend more time discussing your website’s IDX integration, lead captures and anything else tech-related. However, if they’re retired and don’t know a landing page from a sailboat, you might want to spend much less time going over your technology and more time talking about your connections.
Use Emotion First, Logic Second
The Maya Angelou saying is true: “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” While this might seem like a vague platitude, it’s a tried-and-true sales tactic that you need to keep in mind when planning your real estate listing presentation.