3 Steps To Becoming A Better Listing Agent

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Are you one of those agents who takes the mandatory CE classes and calls it a year? Hey, we don’t blame you.

After brushing up on Fair Housing laws, ethics, agency and whatever else is required to keep a license in your state, who wants to cram anything else into their brain?

But, when you think about it, what good does a real estate sales license do if you aren’t a master at real estate sales?

And, that’s something you won’t learn in CE classes

Yeah, it’s challenging to become the best at every aspect of your business. Choosing one aspect and laser-focusing on every facet of it is the way to go.

Just how does one learn to become the listing leader in a market? We asked around, and we got lots of listing agent tips to share with you.

Listing agents are marketers. Why aren’t you immersing yourself in learning about how to be a better one?

In internet forums and Facebook groups, agents are begging for “scripts,” “templates” and ready-made marketing solutions.

There are no shortcuts, no templates that will make you a better marketer (and, thus, listing agent) than every other agent in town.

It’s the best marketers who earn the best sales stats (which impress potential clients when used to market yourself). It’s also these agents who have the most amazing successes (and the testimonials to back them up).

Scripts and dialogs may get you the listing, but they are not going to help you market your clients’ homes.

Unless you were in marketing before going into real estate, and unless you’ve taken the time to become self-taught, you’ll need to start your education with real estate Marketing 101.

Listing agent tips to grab attention and hold a client’s interest

“Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action,” are the four pillars of marketing and advertising, according to Arlie Peyton at Medium.com.

He goes on to say that you can grab people’s attention through their senses and that “usually, it’s visual.” Most real estate agents know this, which is why the best listing agents have an architectural photographer on speed dial.

And, it’s not just anecdotal evidence backing this up. Ocular studies conducted by a team at the Institute for Behavioral and Experimental Real Estate at Old Dominion University at Norfolk, Va. found that “the photo is overwhelmingly viewed first,” when buyers look at online listings.

They also found that buyers ignored listings without photos

An ace photographer, however, is only one piece of the attention-grabbing puzzle. The marketing-genius listing agent knows which segment of the buyer pool will be attracted to each home they list.

She then dives deeper by researching current buyer trends so that the home is staged to be visually appealing to that group of buyers and so that the photographer can more heavily focus on those aspects.

Then, they set up the MLS listing so that those photos are front and center – the first that the buyers lay eyes on.

Use your words to build desire

The aforementioned ocular studies found that 60 percent of all study participants read the agent remarks section of the listing.

Again, this is a way to grab attention for your listings and the best way to do so is by telling the home’s story.

Sure, word-count limits are skimpy, but a marketer can pack a whole lot of attention-grabbing, desire-building text into that space.

We recently pointed out a study we read at realtor.com®. The results showed that, in spring, listings with certain summertime-related words outperformed listings without them.

Michigan homebuyers, for instance, coughed up 36 percent more per square foot for homes with listing descriptions that mentioned “summer fun” or “summer days.” Read more about this study here on Easy Agent Pro.

Know what the home’s target audience desires and use your words to cleverly play up those aspects of your listing.

There is so much more to learn

It’s so easy to become a licensed real estate agent. And, that’s the problem. Far too many seem to think that having a license is all that’s required to be successful. They sit back and complain that they can’t get that FSBO unless someone else gives them the magic script.

There is, however, so much more to learn if you hope to be a wildly successful listing agent. Learn how to manage people – their psychology, how to appeal to those hopes and dreams and how to reach them through their emotions.

Professional development should be an ongoing aspect of your real estate business. And, as a listing agent, this development should be heavy on anything marketing-related.

Learn how to conduct marketing research, the most effective marketing methods on social media and anything else related to how to reach homebuyers and understand their wants and needs.

Look for online workshops and webinars for additional listing agent tips. Or, check out your local SCORE office. They frequently offer free workshops of special interest to small business owners.

In Maine, for instance, an upcoming SCORE workshop titled “Marketing your Products and Services” can help you learn not only how to market homes, but your real estate services as well.

SCORE also offers interactive, online training courses in a variety of topics. Seek out anything that promises to teach you how to market a product (which, in your case, is a home you’ve listed). And then follow through on these listing agent tips.

Step away from the real estate advice givers and peruse psychology and marketing websites to find nuggets of wisdom that can be used in marketing listings.

It’s going to take time. Nobody is going to spoon feed you your words. Nobody has the magical script or dialog that will make you the town’s listing leader. It’s all up to you.

How bad do you want it?

Just breaking into real estate? Here are some tips that can help make your first year a success:

Trying to stage a home on a budget? Here are some tips to make the most of a listing without breaking the bank.