How a small, one-time investment can help you take your business to the next level!
Hello, my name is Ellen Mikesell and I’ve been in the real estate business for many years now, both in the “trenches” as a licensed broker and for the past five years as a trainer and expert on marketing products.
But let me tell you a story of when I was such a brand-new agent that I didn’t even know that rookies weren’t supposed to be able to take listings! I was so wet behind the ears I hadn’t even heard all the nay-sayers who talked about how only special, almost superhuman beings called “Strong Listers” or “Top Producers” did any consistent listing business. These agents spent small fortunes on marketing and even then, often listed maybe one out of three or four the of the listing appointments they went on. Sure, the thinking went, a rookie might talk a friend or relative into listing with them out of pity, but no one seriously expected a beginner to walk in cold with a stranger and take the listing. Especially if the rookie was going up against a “Heavy Hitter”!
How A Rookie Agent Beat Out A Seasoned Pro First Time Out
Somehow, in my very first week of real estate, I came up with a listing prospect and even managed to set an appointment! I wasn’t really sure what to do at that point. I had some vague notion that you were supposed to tell the sellers what their home might be worth (I quite honestly had no idea!) and tell them what you were going to do to market the home (again, I had no idea!). So I sat down that afternoon and typed out all the stuff I could think of that made me sound good and all the stuff I could think of that I would do to sell their home. I threw in some stuff I’d read about being careful not to over-price their home and that was it.
The listing appointment was set up for a few days in the future, so I thought I’d mail them a copy of this list because I knew I would forget it all when I got to their house and actually had to try to get the listing. I also included a letter thanking them for the appointment and saying I would call to confirm the day before. Thus humbly was my first “Pre-Listing Package” born! By the time I got to the listing appointment, they had read all of the stuff I had written and had some questions written up for me about it. Luckily, I was able to answer them all and then they told me they wanted me to sell their house! Somehow I fumbled through the listing contract, and luckily they had a recent appraisal that helped in pricing the house.
When I got back to the office I was jubilant, and my fellow agents were amazed. I hadn’t even closed a buyer deal yet and I had gotten a listing? And it wasn’t a relative or a friend? Naturally they all wanted to know how I did it, so I told them about the list of stuff I had sent out to the seller. A couple of them said, “Oh, I do that, too, only I tell them about it when I get there instead of sending it in advance.” Another said she thought sending out a “pre-listing package” (I didn’t know what it was called until then!) was a great idea but somehow she’d never gotten around to putting one together.
It wasn’t until a couple of months (and several more listings) that I found out that on that very first listing appointment I’d gone up against two very successful and well known agents in my market and gotten the listing away from them! The reason – I had sent the sellers a pre-listing package and the other agents thought they were so well known they didn’t have to! I am told that to this day one of those agents does a slow burn whenever she is reminded how she lost that listing to a rookie. But she never found out why, and I hear she still doesn’t use a pre-listing package – which is fine by me!