A world fit to be conquered: Five steps to total real estate listing dominance

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Here’s the thing: We want to be excellent real estate listing agents. But there’s more to it than that. We want to be so good at listing real estate that no one can compete with us. The idea of selling “by-owner” pales in the light of what we do, but we want to be so effective, and so thorough, that not even our fellow Realtors will be able to compete against us. We want to charge top dollar — take that, Freakonomics! — and we want for other Realtors to get only the work we turn down.

That’s not very nice, is it? We’re not actually mean about anything, but to be the best necessarily implies that everyone else will be less than the best. Plus which, it kindasorta matters to our clients that we get the job done — and we don’t get paid until then, either.

Before I get to my list of five techniques, there are a couple of lists of three to consider. First, a successful listing praxis consists of three parts: Hiring the seller, marketing the home and servicing the transaction. I’ll be addressing marketing tactics below, but note that I said that we hire the sellers. Too many agents think the seller is hiring them, and it leads them into one obsequious error after another. We work with people who know that we know more about selling houses than they do. We interview them very carefully, and we turn down the ones who can’t or won’t do what we need them to do. We can only sell the houses that will sell — and whose owners are willing to sell — so we avoid the others.

Second, contracting a real estate listing actually entails three sales. We work very hard to sell the house with our marketing, but, before we can do that, we have to sell the sellers on working our way. And, as an ancillary consequence of working our way, we are going to sell a certain portion of the neighbors on working our way in the future. We don’t use our listings to market ourselves as listers. But the very things we do to draw attention to our listings tend to draw attention to us as listing Realtors. A pervasive attitude among the general public is that listing agents don’t do very much to earn their commissions. Whether or not this impression is justified, our outsized efforts attract the notice of homeowners who are paying attention to the work we do and the results we achieve.

So what is that work? There are dozens of things we do — some large, some small, some common, some unique — but I’m going to talk about five things we do that no one does, five killer tactics that sell our houses, in turn selling future sellers on our value as listing agents. Why am I willing to share these ideas? Wouldn’t it be better to hoard them as secret strategies? Actually, no battle plan survives contact with the enemy: Everything we’re doing is inescapably evident to the senses. There is nothing that prevents our competition from reverse engineering our marketing, whether or not I choose to talk about it. But, guess what? They don’t. Either our philosophy seems too odd to them, or our practices seem like too much work, but it remains that no one does the kinds of things we do to promote our listings.

Such as what, exactly?

1. We build a huge custom sign with a custom price rider for every one of our luxury, historic or architecturally-distinctive listings. Why? Because a real estate sign is not a poster or a billboard, it’s an advertisement. Our signs stop traffic, which gets buyers looking at the house, reading the flyer, arranging a showing. What’s the custom rider for? To state the asking price in big, unmistakable numbers. We answer the buyer’s first question without having to be asked, in the process establishing our transparency as listers.

2. We build a custom web site or weblog for every home we list. We take hundreds of photos of our listings, and there is no better gallery for digital photos than a web site. But we also make every document we can obtain about the home available as PDF files on the web site: The MLS listing itself, comparable listings, the appraisal or inspection reports, if available, the property disclosure statement, any historical records we can unearth, etc. Our web sites sell houses, of course. But they also serve to dominate the buyer’s mind: If a potential buyer spends two hours going through everything on our web site, that’s two hours that can’t be deployed looking at other homes. We do everything we can to swing the balance in our sellers’ favor, and our web sites make a huge difference.

3. We use multi-media in vast multitudes. We do virtual tours, of course, just like everyone else. Virtual tour solutions run the gamut from abysmal to wretched, but we do what we can to make up for that by exhibiting the digital photos on our web sites in interactive Javascript slide shows. Plus which, we will often do a second virtual tour featuring nearby homes, so that buyers can get a feel for their new neighborhood. We produce an interactive floorplan for our listings, so that buyers can plan where their furniture will go in the home. This is not a toy: When you commit your bed to a specific location, you are committing your mind to buying the home. Recently, we have begun to play with listing videos, striving to find a programming format that works to sell the home, one that is more than just a boring presentation of muddy, redundant images. Our MLS system permits only six photographs, but it allows for any number of virtual tours, which are designated simply by a link to off-system resources. We link to the two virtual tours, the interactive floorplan and the listing videos. As we come up with more multi-media solutions, we will link to those as well. As above, the more mind-share we can dominate, the less potent our competition.

4. We promote. Period. We promote the listing and its web site in everything we do. Our MLS permits us to mention the web site’s address, so anyone seeing our listings by email or on an IDX system can find the site. We promote on Ebay.com, Craigslist.com, Zillow.com, Realtor.com and a host of other sites. Most importantly, we promote door-to-door. We will distribute thousands of Open House cards for a listing, and thousands more Just Sold cards when it sells. Most often, we use the business card form factor for this work. The cards are small, unobtrusive, easy to pocket and cost-efficient. In some neighborhoods, an Open House can draw a hundred viewing parties because of the promotion we do.

5. We write — rhapsodically. The house will sell itself — if it is prepared right, priced right, staged right — another list of three! But in our market, right now, there are nine available homes for every qualified buyer. Assuming there is more than one house that might “sell itself” to a buyer, we want to do everything we can to make sure the homes we represent sell first. Photographs sell houses. Virtual and video tours sell houses. The massive quantities of information we provide through our web sites sells houses. But we leave nothing to chance, so we use the most poetic copy we can devise to help potential buyers find their idealized future selves within our homes. We know why we love the homes we list — and we don’t list homes we don’t love. We best represent our sellers by communicating that love to potential buyers.

Here’s the fun part of working this way: The accumulated work product for a listing this intense might be five or six gigabytes of data. The web site alone will run to 100 megabytes. Why don’t other Realtors compete with us to provide this kind of value to sellers? Doing these things takes a lot of work, a lot of time, a lot of knowledge, a lot of hardware and software. More than that, though, you have to believe in the efficacy of the approach — and you have to be efficient at and undaunted by huge tasks. We are pretty confident that no other Realtors in our market will try to compete against us by doing any of these things. But, if they ever do, by the time they get around to copying these ideas, we will be doing vastly different things. We want to sell houses, but we want to sell houses at an incomparable level of skill, moving — incrementally, to be sure, but by every means we can conceive — toward abstract perfection. There is more to listing a home than marketing, but we want to perfect our praxis at absolutely everything we do.

Even so, our competitors are relatively safe from us — for now. We want to list a house a week. We’re well wide of that mark so far. But time is on our side — as is our track record. Every time we hit the ball out of the park, we make new converts to our way of thinking, and homeowners come to us pre-sold not just on us as listers but on the ideas I’ve discussed here. We tell everyone everything, just as I’m doing right now, so the people who are paying attention in the neighborhoods we work in know exactly what we’re doing. The Realtors don’t get it, but the sellers all understand.

In this way, in the long run, we will be a dominant force everywhere we want to work. It’s actually pretty easy, when you think about it. To succeed in any business, all you have to do is give your clients higher quality and better service than they can get anywhere else for the same money. Here’s our challenge to the marketplace: Catch us if you can…

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