How to Improve Your Listing Presentation
As a real estate agent, your success is dependent on your listing presentation and pitch. From start to finish, your realtor listing presentation will showcase who you are and how you bring value to your clients. It should include key metrics like local market statistics, an overview of your selling process, and how you help your clients get the most value out of their homes, which will instill a sense of confidence and trust.
Today I thought I’d share some of my best tips to improve your listing presentation so that you can become the champion of real estate listing.
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What Is a Real Estate Listing Presentation?
A real estate listing presentation can be viewed as a realtor’s elevator pitch. Creating a strong listing presentation is crucial to the success of your business. This is because it’s your opportunity to convince sellers to choose you to sell their home over other realtors, investors, at auction, or by themselves.
In today’s increasingly remote world, you may even need to host a virtual listing presentation. A virtual listing is similar to a traditional listing presentation but is delivered through a video conferencing platform like Zoom or Skype. While virtual presentations may take time to get used to, they allow you to get into contact with clients who may be further away or can’t meet in person.
There are several ways you can present your realtor listing presentation, such as on a PowerPoint deck, a brochure, a video, or another form of visual presentation. No matter the format, your real estate listing presentation should contain key elements, such as:
- Listing price of the home
- Reasoning for your listing price
- Interior upgrades
- Exterior upgrades
- Landscapes
- Staging
- Other relevant fixes or remodels
By creating a thorough listing presentation that outlines the key points as to why you should be chosen as a seller’s listing agent and how you’ll help them get their home sold faster and for more money, you’ll close more deals. Creating a listing presentation for real estate agents is important, but how do you win over clients with your presentation? Below, we’ll cover the ins and outs of creating a winning real estate listing presentation that helps you grow your business.
Critical Elements To Real Estate Listing Presentation Success
As you know, in order to succeed as a real estate agent, you need to master your listing presentation. To help you show your confidence and expertise during your next realtor listing presentation, we’ve rounded up the key elements needed for your success.
From learning how to create an engaging introduction to using pricing analogies and earning trust before your presentation, these are the critical components to successful listing presentations for real estate agents:
1. Create a Brief But Engaging Introduction
As with any presentation, your first few minutes are crucial. To master your real estate listing presentation, you need to engage your audience within the first 60 seconds to grab their attention and convince them you’re the realtor to sign with.
In the first 60 seconds, tell a brief but captivating story, such as a previous home you’ve sold or a current property you’re working on now. Remember, most of your listing presentation will focus on your client, but your introduction is your time to provide your background information and show your client how you can help them sell their home.
2. Explain the Sales Timeline
One of the top questions clients will have when it comes to selling their homes is “how long will the process take?” In today’s market, homes are selling fast, which means clients need to be fully prepared for a fast turnaround. When explaining the sales process, highlight each step of the way, including:
- Pre-sale events
- Marketing timeline
- Listing period
- Offers
- Acceptance
- Closing the deal
By explaining the sales timeline, your clients will know what to expect throughout the process.
3. Ask Questions
The goal of your listing presentation is to show clients how you’ll sell their homes and perform better than other agents. With that said, it’s important to keep your clients top of mind throughout your listing presentation. To do this, make sure to ask important questions throughout to better understand their goals and values. Some questions to ask include:
Why do you want to sell your home?
- What date do you need to move?
- What are your plans if your home doesn’t sell?
- Where are you looking to move to?
- Are there any current issues with your home that need to be addressed?
- How much money do you still owe on your mortgage?
With these questions, you can curtail your listing presentation as you go to align with their values and goals and help them sell their home.
4. Highlight Personal Statistics
You need to sell yourself when delivering your listing presentation. One of the best ways to do so is to highlight your personal stats that prove to your clients why and how you’re successful. Some statistics to show your clients include:
- Your sales compared to the market average
- The average days on the market for your listings
- Year-after-year sales
These are just some of the statistics you can showcase in your listing presentation. To make them more powerful, export your personal data from your MLS into a spreadsheet to create graphs, maps, and charts that help your clients visualize your success.
5. Explain Your Marketing Plan
Your marketing plan is imperative to the home selling process. As one of the key components of selling a home, you need to explain to your clients how you plan on marketing their home. Some current marketing trends that can put you ahead of your competition include:
- Virtual tours
- HD photography
- 3D floor plans/property scans
- Social media posts
- Property videos
By advertising on a wide range of platforms, from social media to home listing sites and even around the neighborhood with lawn signs, you can attract more prospective buyers interested in buying your client’s house.
6. Use This Great Pricing Objection Handler
Another statement you’re bound to hear from homeowners is this:
“Another agent said they can get me much more…”
When you do, use this script:
I could line up a thousand agents outside your door, but we’re all looking at the same data and we’ll all come in within one or two percent of each other. So if someone is promising you much more, you’ve gotta ask yourself what they’re up to. Are they just wanting to take your listing to generate a bunch of buyer clients? What’s their motive?
This approach plants the seeds of doubt in the seller’s mind and gets them to understand what seems too good to be true probably is too good to be true.
7. Earn Their Trust Prior to Your Presentation
Question: What do you do in between the time you schedule a listing appointment and the time you show up for that appointment?
I really hope your answer isn’t “Nothing.”
So… that gap from after you hang up from booking the appointment until you show up? This is prime “trust-building” time.
Here’s my pre-appointment strategy to set yourself apart and begin earning people’s trust way before you ever meet face-to-face. Don't forget the listing appointment checklist, that can help too.
1. Shortly after setting the appointment, email a personalized video following this script:
Hey [Homeowner’s Name] it’s [Your Name] with [Your Company]. Thank you so much for the opportunity to come out and speak to you about the sale of your home. I know you had a lot of choices in real estate professionals locally, and I’m honored and thrilled to talk to you about how I can sell your home for top dollar in the shortest amount of time. Below you’re going to see a number of things that can help you make an informed decision about selecting the right agent for the job of selling your home. [Then give them a quick rundown of the following assets you will send along with the video.]
2. In that email, include links to:
- Your step-by-step marketing plan – Be sure to “stack the cool.” The average agent has 11 things on their list. The more you have, the more you’ll stand out. For bonus points, write the property address on a whiteboard and include a photo of you and your team strategizing on marketing possibilities in front of it.
- A map of properties you’ve sold – Don’t just do a list… a map is more engaging.
- Your reviews – The more specific to convey your skills, the better.
- Stats, graphs, and charts – To illustrate your degree of separation… Comparing you vs. MLS averages, etc.
- Your team of experts – To establish expectations and demonstrate it takes more than one person to manage the process of selling your home.
This might sound like a big effort, but it’s worth it! You’re priming the client to win the listing, and in some cases, you might flush out those who aren’t really motivated before wasting additional time on a fruitless presentation.
8. Send Another Video on the Morning of Your Appointment
To further prime the homeowner for your presentation, send another video on the morning of the day of the appointment. Here’s the script:
Hi [Homeowner’s Name] it’s [Your Name], just wanted to make sure we were set today for [Time]. I’m really excited. The team and I are super fired up, we’ve been working really hard on reverse engineering how we’re going to find the ideal buyer for your home. And because we’ve sold so many homes in [Neighborhood], we already know exactly how to find the buyer. I just wanted to make sure you watched my previous video and you took the time to review some of the information I sent you in those links. Would you please do that before we meet today?
9. “Reverse” Your Presentation for Maximum Impact
Now it’s the moment of truth. Make sure you show up for the appointment early just to be sure you can knock on the door punctually at your set time.
When it comes to your actual listing presentation, rather than take the traditional angle of “I’m going to show you everything I can do for you” for the homeowner, I suggest you follow Gary Gold’s approach and do a “reverse” listing presentation.
What does that mean?
It’s simple, actually. Rather than make a promise to the homeowner about what you can do for them, show them a case study of what you’ve done for others and walk them through the process in reverse order.
Rather than starting from what you do right after you take a listing, show the homeowner everything you did to achieve the result. For instance:
We recently sold a property very much like yours for 3% over asking price and for 22% faster than the average home is selling in our marketplace. The sellers were thrilled and they wrote a five-star review on Zillow about what we were able to do for them.
Now, what got us to that point? Well, we ended up getting eight different offers. We went through those eight offers with the sellers and they chose which worked best for their needs.
Before we got those eight offers, we had 87 people who came to our Mega Open House, which is the same thing I’m going to do for your home. Now I want to explain how we got 87 people to view the home. Look here… We had 4,200 impressions on Zillow, 1,893 on Trulia 2,000 on Realtor.com, 3,100 on Facebook, 74 on Instagram, 177 on Twitter and 355 people watched the entire home tour video on YouTube.
Continue that approach throughout your entire presentation. Be sure to include your broker preview, photography and videography, staging and trace the process all the way back to you earning that listing and starting the ball rolling.
When you do this “reverse” presentation, you’re letting your track record work for you. You’re demonstrating your ability to achieve the results they desire. It’s basically all the same information but presented in a more powerful way.
Also, make sure to include high-quality printouts/fliers of all the information you linked to in your pre-appointment video email – your marketing plan, your “Sold” map, your reviews, your degree of separation, your team photo, and descriptions of each person’s role. Leave those materials behind with the homeowner, even if you’ve presented them digitally as part of your presentation. Coaching client Karen Stone from New York City not only uses this “reverse” approach in her listing presentations but also demonstrates her abilities in her marketing. Check out this postcard she uses:
Below is an example of several of these “differentiators” from my brother Patrick, who sells in San Diego. If you’d like to see all six pages up close and personal, download the PDF here.
5 Tips for Winning Real Estate Listing Presentation
We discussed the critical elements needed for a successful real estate listing presentation. Now, let’s dive into how you can win your listing presentation to gain more clients and close more deals. Explore our five tips to improve your listing presentation today below:
- Know your customers: Always research your customers before meeting them. This is important because not every client is the same, which means you’ll have to create a new listing presentation for each client to ensure you win them over.
Information you should research about your client includes their relationship status, such as whether they’re single or married with a family, where they’re planning on moving, how they want to sell, and the type of offer they want. - Know the market, neighborhood, culture, and community: In order to market the seller’s property, you need to have a firm grasp on the market and community associated with the home. How much have homes in the neighborhood sold for recently? What ratings do the schools have? What’s the local crime rate? These are all important questions to have answered before giving your listing presentation.
- Make sure you are in the right mindset: To ensure you’re in the right mindset before your listing presentation, visualize speaking with your customers before meeting them. Whether that’s the night before while you’re laying in bed or when you’re rehearsing the morning of in your office, getting in the right mindset can help you gain confidence and clarity about the pitch you’re about to give. It also gives you the opportunity to think of potential questions or concerns that the seller might have during your listing presentation and brainstorm answers.
- Tell the story: Sellers want to work with real estate agents with a proven track record. To instill trust and confidence in your clients, provide them with data that tells your story, such as, “I’ve been on 62 appointments and 58 people choose to work with me” or “I’ve sold X homes X% over the asking pricing.” With data that validates your claims, sellers will work with you to ensure they get the most money for their homes.
- Share examples of how you’ve helped customers in similar situations: There are many reasons why someone might be selling their home. Maybe they received a job offer they can’t refuse and have to relocate. Or perhaps they have a new child on the way and need to upgrade to a larger house.
Once you research your client and understand their reasons for selling, craft your listing presentation around that. With examples that show how you’ve helped clients in similar situations sell their homes, they’ll have more trust in your abilities to help them, too.
With these five tips for improving your listing presentation, you’ll be able to win more clients and earn commission from your deals. However, once you deliver your listing presentation, you’re not done. You still have to close the deal, which means it’s time to put together an amazing OPEN HOUSE!
Final Thoughts On Making A Powerful Real Estate Listing Presentation
Throughout this article, you learned key pieces to creating a successful listing presentation, such as scripts to use for common client questions and ways to reverse your presentation for maximum impact. You also learned tips for winning your realtor listing presentation, such as ways to know your customers, how to tell your story, and getting in the right mindset.
At Tom Ferry, we have the resources to help you succeed in all areas of real estate. Not only do we have an informational podcast with episodes like Three Top Agents Reveal How to Win Every Listing, we also offer real estate coaching to help you hone your skills and grow your business.
We’ve helped scale the businesses of tens of thousands of real estate agents.
When you start with a free real estate coaching consultation, chances are we can help scale yours as well. Schedule yours today!
