Nail Your Next Pre-Listing Package With These Five Strategies

In a competitive market, setting yourself apart from the pack becomes even more critical. And that race starts from the very first interaction with a potential client.

“If your market is anything like ours, it is a very competitive market to get listings, between the days on market basically being nonexistent and the number of agents,” says Joseph Klosik, a KW agent, operating principal and team leader from Charleston, South Carolina.

In many cases, the first opportunity you have to distinguish yourself with your value proposition comes in the pre-listing package.

“I really feel like when you drop off the pre-listing package, you’re setting the expectations for a seller and what they think is going to happen through the process,” says Nancy Chu, a KW agent, rainmaker, team lead, and market center investor from Montclair, New Jersey. “I keep things in my packet that tell them what the process is going to look like, what kind of marketing I’m going to do, information about our team and how we approach listings, and our mission statement as well. I think that’s an important thing. They need to know who they’re working with.”

Thankfully, part of being a KW agent involves getting a chance to learn how to do that from the best.

“Replicate and duplicate,” says Mike Duley, a team lead and market center manager from Northwest Arkansas. “That’s what we’re here for is to help each other.”

From the time you set the appointment to delivering the pre-listing package, here are the strategies that sing for Klosik, Chu, and Duley.

Nail Your Pre-Listing Package

1) Know Your Market.

For Chu, whose market is 12 miles from New York City and contains 100-year-old homes that each have been renovated differently over the years, that means breaking down the pre-listing appointment into two steps. Once the appointment is set, she generates the pre-listing package and drops it off, giving her a look inside the home to see the renovations and the home’s condition. Then she’ll schedule a second visit with the actual comparable market analysis.

“It sounds wildly inefficient, but it’s very effective for my market center,” Chu says. “If I can have those two steps, I usually have a better rate of capture in terms of getting that listing signed. If I’m forced to move quickly in a market area where every house is sort of individually renovated to every person’s taste, I’ll end up not being able to get the listing because it’s too fast.”

2) Set the Tone from the Jump.

You can wax poetic about your multimedia know-how, or you can show how much you know from the get-go. Duley and his team focus on the latter. Their pre-listing package, which contains their team’s value proposition, actually lives on YouTube.

“We ask our team members to text that over to the potential client, and then they get it right on their phone,” Duley says. “I think that’s a win because people are visual these days, and they can go right on YouTube, which already sets a standard for, ‘These people know media. They know social media. They’re going to list my house this way.’ So it’s a win.”

3) Nix the Acronyms.

You can come across as an expert without unintentionally making your clients feel small. To that end, Duley recommends rethinking your terminology usage and especially the alphabet soup of acronyms, starting with re-terming a CMA as a home equity analysis.

“Be careful because your client doesn’t understand, and it can come off as you believing you’re smarter than them, and that’s not it at all,” Duley says. “You just live in a whirl all day, so you’ve got to slow down.”

4) Use Real Metrics.

Anyone can claim to be a marketing whiz or a social media pro, but you’ll set yourself apart if you put your money where your mouth is by incorporating real metrics into your pre-listing package.

“I do think it’s always really important to put in things like BrokerMetrics so you can emphasize the amount of market share we have in the area,” Chu says. “Also, we include how we handle our Facebook and Instagram ads with performance metrics. People want to know there’s actual metrics on how those ads are performing.”

Klosik reiterates the importance of numbers.

“If you just say, ‘Hey, I’m on Facebook,’ well, great; everyone is,” he says. “But if you give results, that’s so important.”

5) Send the Calendar Invite.

In recent times, most plans have shifted from definite to tentative. To increase the odds that you’ll be able to hand off your pre-listing package in person, Duley recommends going with this tactical move.

“I would say, ‘Hey, Joseph, I want to make sure I have your email address correct. I know you’re busy, and I’m busy, so I want to go ahead and send a calendar invite over so we can schedule this appointment. And also, will all the decision makers be there when I arrive at 3 p.m. tomorrow?’” Duley says. “Your conversion goes way up when you send a calendar invite instead of saying, ‘Hey, I’ll meet you at 3 p.m.’ How many times have people had appointments where they’re like, ‘Oh, I forgot. I’m dropping my daughter off at soccer.’ That’s the world we live in, especially now.”