Listings

The Listing Challenge

My Notes from Tom Ferry’s Listing Challenge Webinar Series: Part One

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This webinar was presented on June 21, 2024, and here are my notes.

Hosts: Tom Ferry, Jimmy Mackin, and David Childers

This is a skills, marketing, and follow-up market. A lot of agents weren’t ready for the shift into this environment.

When 2024 started, we were a little rosy about how things are going to be. The market hasn’t changed that drastically from where we started at the end of the year and we are now in a political cycle making the existing market even more challenging.

The commitment we are going to make is going to be now for the next 12 months. They will help us with the mindset and the marketing that we need to get through this market. 1M+ agents in the first four months of this year took zero listings according to his experts reporting. Their goal is to help us avoid this.

Go to TheListingChallenge.com to download their app named In Here to get live roleplays, marketing and more for free!

David Childers explains his take on the market. You can find all his slides on The Listing Challenge.com. The #1 question he’s getting is about what’s ahead for the second half of the year.

4.8M homes were sold in the US in the last year. Many people are wondering if the market is going to crash. Lack of housing inventory is what is keeping the prices up right now. A crash is unlikely due to a tremendous amount of demand for homes in the US.

88% of the mortgages in this country are below 6%. 88%. Not everyone will make a decision based on having a low mortgage rate, but people are going to do everything they can to stay with those low rates.

Be the knowledge broker in your local market.

Use this line for prospective sellers: “If the only thing you love about your home is your interest rate, we should talk.”

We saw unhealthy price appreciation in 2021 and 2022, but we will see a more normal path of appreciation in this period.

It’s unlikely that we will see 5% rates this year. There will probably be 1 rate cut this year. Overhwelmingly the banks are saying this will likely happen in September of this year.

We will probably see one rate cut this year, but not many more, and there will not be a big tsunami of things shifting.

Jimmy Mackin on marketing for listings. They’ve learned that getting busy isn’t the hard part, it’s staying busy. You need to be on offense and taking action all the time.

Today’s Agenda:

  • Generate Buyers
  • Leverage Buyers for Listings
  • Sell your Success

The order of operations matters in this. First, you generate high-quality buyers that you can leverage as an asset. Create the right hook or offer to get buyers excited to work with us.

(He’s using this thing where his body is over the screen, so don’t mind those smudges, it’s Jimmy’s shirt, etc.)

Focus on the parts of the market that are the hottest. Fewest DOM and most demand within your farm.

If something works in one channel, extend that strategy to another channel. Take a screenshot of the map of the area you’re focusing on and make a story post that looks like this.

Use the responses that you get to build a relationship with these people.

Step two: Leverage these new buyers to send this letter to.

This letter is very specific about what the buyers are looking for and the timing. It’s low pressure calls to action that has been proven to work.

Qualify these buyers and turn them into letters that you send to your farm.

Look for people who have owned their house for 5+ years and have 40% or more of equity, and find the most desirable neighborhoods. If you don’t know where to find this information, ask your Title rep to help you.

Marketing is all about stacking the layers of campaigns. This is how you drive results within the business. Hit the phones and circle dialing the area that you sent the letter to.

This is a great way to get the conversation started and get your foot in the door.

Send the email campaign, post on social media, get your list together of people you want to target, send your letters, and then start using the above script to create the conversations that generate action.

This helps you find off-market listings and generate inventory.

Show your sweat. Talk about what you are doing to generate this action for your clients. Sellers don’t want to sell because they are locked into a super low interest rate. By showing them that you are capable of helping them find somewhere to go, even if they can’t see it right now.

Use this letter to send after you’ve helped someone do this.

Putting all of this together, you have a cohesive strategy to generate action from your database and create some momentum with your listings.

Go to ListingChallenge.com and register for these slides within the app.

They will do this on the third Friday of every month. This market is one of the most challenging that they have ever seen and they want to challenge us to step up and take action. Get outside of your comfort zone and give this a shot.

kitchen-table

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Nine Ways to Help Your Team Crush Their Listing Presentations

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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!