A strong listing program has always been key to a successful real estate business. Now more than ever it’s crucial to give this important topic your attention so that you can support and develop your team. We are hearing a lot about how to market for more listings, but we also need to invest time and effort into coaching our agents so they can be more confident and knowledgeable to get more signs in the ground.

Use these strategies to guide your team to grow their skills and their book of business!

📝 Hold dedicated listing meetings. Setting aside time solely for listings will force you and your team to invest time and energy into this part of your business. It’s best to do this monthly and separately from your sales meetings. Discuss existing listings and brainstorm ways to update pricing, navigating challenging conversations, marketing, and MLS listing strategies to get movement. We used to call reviewing the MLS listings “Roast My Listing”. You can also role-play, review any current marketing, and market conditions, and work on strategies to grow your listing presence in your market.

🍽️ Set up a mock kitchen table to practice role-playing listing appointments. Grab a little bistro table and two chairs, throw a tablecloth on it, and ask your agents to role-play different parts of their listing presentations. During your listing meetings if someone mentions that they struggled during a recent appointment with a topic or conversation, ask them to come to the front to re-enact it and have others come up and role-play what they would have said in the same scenario. I know everyone hates role play, but this exercise not only boosts the skills of the person who raised the challenge but the entire team watching. If you want to get better, you have to do the uncomfortable things too!

👩‍🏫 Ask your top listing agents to mentor and share. Encourage a culture of education and growth from all parts of your organization. You may be the leader, but allowing your agents to share what is currently working for them will help your team to hear different points of view and discover new skills and strategies that they can make their own. This also helps to develop leadership amongst your ranks by allowing them to lead portions of meetings, speak publicly, and mentor others. 

📑 Review and update your listing presentation for today’s market. Have a professional listing presentation and review it annually. Go through each page and brainstorm with others on ways to make it more clear, what you should remove, and what new information should be featured that will help educate sellers for today’s conditions. And for goodness sake, if you don’t have a listing presentation stop reading this right now and get started on making one.

🪧 Make sure your team understands your marketing. Guaranteed sold! I’ll buy it if it doesn’t sell! Use my moving truck if you list with me! Your marketing doesn’t work if your agents don’t know how to talk about it. They are the ones answering the phones and incoming messages in response to it, so ensure that they know what your current marketing is, how it works, and provide them with suggested language to use when someone calls so that they can speak to it with confidence and book that appointment.

🏋️‍♀️ Ongoing listing training. Yes, this would also be in addition to your monthly listing meeting! Set up a training to cover the listing process from soup to nuts. This will help you to develop an army of listing agents and allow those who have started listing but don’t feel like they have mastered it to take your training again and again until they feel confident. Every six months or quarterly would be a good cadence for this. Create a syllabus and adjust it over time so that you’re not recreating the wheel every time the class is held.

📈 Make sure your team understands market statistics and how to run a true full CMA. Being able to nail your listing appointment is one thing, but if your agents don’t understand the market or how to properly price a house, they’ll fumble the ball after the paperwork is signed. Have a concentration on this during your listing meetings and training sessions so that your agents are incredibly confident and capable in this area to serve your clients well.

🤝 Practice tough conversations with the seller about price. This is the other component of nailing your CMA and explaining the market well. Role-playing conversations with sellers who are dead-set on a certain, sometimes unreasonable, price will allow your agents to calmly and successfully navigate these challenging scenarios so that the seller feels educated, supported, and that your agents are acting in their best interest of their bottom line.

🔎 Track and report on met listing appointments. It’s never fun to tell someone that you went on a listing appointment and didn’t get it, but by tracking and reporting on the appointments you create opportunities for conversations and coaching so that you can conduct a post-mortem on what happened and develop skills so that it doesn’t happen again. Also, chances are, someone else has had an appointment in the same area recently and they can share what worked or didn’t work for them before the agent goes to the meeting. Don’t keep your appointments a secret!