What to Include in a Winning Prelisting Package
Kaylee specializes in real estate, B2B, and SaaS companies. You can find her expertise in sales and real estate content on Fit Small Business.
This article is part of a larger series on Real Estate Lead Generation and Marketing.
When you’re trying to get more real estate listings, you need to show potential clients that you can sell their home for the most money and that you will be a trustworthy, responsive, and valuable asset in their homeselling process. The best way to do that is by creating an effective prelisting package (also called a pitch packet or pitch deck) to give to listing leads that explains why they should hire you.
A comprehensive prelisting package has the power to take a potential client from skeptical lead to loyal customer and contains the following elements:
1. The Introduction Letter
(Source: Keller Williams)
The introduction of your prelisting packet should be a personalized letter that directly addresses the homeowner and explains what the package includes. You don’t have to write a new letter every time, and you can save time in the future by creating a basic prelisting packet introduction letter, but you should at least include some personalization.
Since your prelisting packet is meant to demonstrate why you are uniquely qualified to sell their home, it won’t be impactful if you send them a generic package with clip art. Instead, prepare a template for types of listing clients, like FSBOs, expired listings, referrals, or leads from your sphere of influence.
2. A (Brief) Professional & Personal Biography
(Sources: Sample Pre-Listing Package 1 | Sample Pre-Listing Package 2)
The next section of your prelisting package should be a brief biographical summary (aka bio section), similar to a resume. While your leads won’t have the time or interest to read through your junior high soccer history, they do want to get a sense of your success as a real estate professional and who you are as a person. After all, they’re going to be working with you on what may be a stressful and emotional transaction for the next few months.
Make sure your bio includes:
- Testimonials from former clients
- Your head shot
- References with contact information
- Any real estate designations and their importance (make it clear how it helps your clients)
For more details, learn how to write a real estate bio that helps your listing leads learn more about you in order to turn them into loyal clients.
3. Introduction to Your Brokerage & Team
(Source: Top Producer Pre-Listing Packet)
While most homesellers focus more on the real estate agent than their brokerage, providing a brief overview of your brokerage and team is useful. Include information about your brokerage’s history, sales records, awards, current or recent real estate listings that are comparable to the prospect’s home, and evidence of your firm’s marketing prowess to assure prospective real estate clients that your efforts are further supported by a top-notch brokerage.
In addition, if you work within a team, this is the time to introduce each member, especially any team members the sellers will be in contact with or may be working within the case of your absence. Include short bios with head shots of your title company representative, associate broker(s), marketing support, and virtual assistant. You may even include vendors like contractors, painters, home stagers, and photographers.
(Source: Top Producer Team Members)
4. Statistics Showing Strong Performance
(Source: Sample Statistics)
Along with introducing your brokerage, include statistics about your personal performance as well as the performance of your team and brokerage. Listing clients will most likely want to see data on how quickly you’ve been able to sell houses and how well you’re able to achieve (or even exceed) listing prices.
You can also include pictures and data for comparable properties in the area to show your neighborhood expertise. This can help establish your presence and value of knowledge in the area your potential client is selling their home.
5. Marketing & Advertising Plan
(Source: Sample Marketing Strategy)
(Source: Sample Marketing Strategy)
While you should hold off on making specific pricing recommendations or sharing customized marketing plans, you should include an overview of your marketing skills and tools. Do you use cutting-edge services like virtual staging or Matterport tours? Are you a whiz with online real estate ads? Do you create amazing mailers with the assistance of ProspectsPLUS! or PostcardMania? Now is the time to show off your skills and the resources at your disposal.
If you have a good example showing how you achieved a successful sale with a similar home, include a marketing case study. The study should provide specific details about the tactics you used to demonstrate a property’s value, time on the market, and marketing channels you used.
For example, if you’re pitching an FSBO lead, include a marketing case study on a FSBO property that you or your team recently closed. Use before-and-after pictures and charts showing how quickly you sold the property in comparison to the owner’s initial attempt.
You can also share examples of marketing materials like postcards, flyers, and social media posts, as well as sample property flyers and other marketing materials you’ve used. Make sure to specify which social media marketing channels you use, as well as specific statistics from your social media strategy. With the use of customer relationship management (CRM) analytics tools, you should be able to document where your leads are coming from and create reports to determine which social media channels are best to bring in potential buyer clients. Share these findings with your clients so they are aware of your marketing strategies.
Lastly, don’t forget to mention the real estate listing platforms you’ll use, like Zillow or Realtor.com, and examples of your previous listings. If you’re a Zillow Premier Agent (ZPA), include information about how this benefits your clients to sell their home quickly by encouraging open houses, showing appointments, and outreach from other agents and independent homebuyers.
ZPA connects you with buyers who are actively looking to purchase, so it’s beneficial to advertise your listings on their platform. If you haven’t looked into ZPA yourself, consider visiting their website to learn more.
6. An Overview of the Sales Process
(Source: Double Edge Homes)
By including an overview of the sales process, you give homeowners a clear view of their next steps and help them envision working with you. Make sure to include information about the fee structure for sellers, as well as any additional services they’ll need (e.g., title company, escrow, real estate attorney, mortgage broker, and so on).
Pro tip: While you don’t need to write long explanations of the sales process or cover all of the possibilities, a bulleted list of the basics will go a long way to educate your clients and demonstrate your value. The list you give clients should match your own real estate listing checklist to keep everyone on the same page throughout the process.
7. Market Statistics & Explanation of Comparative Market Analysis (CMA)
The prelisting package is the place to introduce local real estate market data. Include a few statistics about similar homes in the prospective client’s area and mention that you’ll present a comparative market analysis (CMA) during your meeting. Don’t send the full CMA to the sellers before your listing presentation, but explain what it is and how it will help them price their home accurately so they can get the most money from the sale of their home.
Providing this data and information gives homeowners time to think about the market data and anticipate the information that will be included in your CMA. You can also mention that you will need to tour their home before making a final pricing recommendation and ask to set up a time to do so.
8. Sample Contracts & Disclosures
Including a sample real estate listing agreement contract in your prelisting packet helps sellers think past getting their property on the market. Homeowners are often so focused on the overwhelming number of tasks and decisions they’ll have to make in order to list their home that they don’t think about other important details, like contracts and disclosures. Including these documents prepares them for what they’ll face during the process and after they accept an offer.
(Source: e-Forms)
When you and the homeowners are on the same page about the homeselling process and their goals, it allows the whole process to run more smoothly. Discussing potential disclosures during the listing presentation often reveals important information that prevents problems or miscommunications down the line.
9. Checklists & Anticipatory Questions
(Source: Keller Williams Realty)
A great way to end your prelisting package is with a checklist and questions for the homeowners to consider when choosing an agent to list their home. This not only helps prepare them for your listing presentation meeting, it also shows them that your priority is truly helping them in the best possible way. Of course, when you present a list of questions to ask a real estate agent, you should also be prepared to answer each question.
Prelisting Package Best Practices
Like most effective marketing materials, building a great prelisting presentation is as much an art as it is science. What you include will be largely determined by your experience, preferences, and skills, as well as what type of homeowner you’re pitching. This is why you want to keep the various types of sellers in mind when you are constructing your package, so as to tailor it to their particular needs.
For example, a For Sale by Owner (FSBO) lead needs different types of education than a typical seller, for instance, the value of working with an agent rather than selling their home on their own. A first-time seller might need a more in-depth understanding of the homeselling process than someone who’s sold multiple homes. Or an expired listing seller might need to be re-encouraged to work with an agent if their first agent failed to sell their home the first time around.
However, in general, a prelisting package should address the following:
- Demonstrates how the real estate agent can sell the client’s home to meet the homeowner’s goals
- Describes what the homeowner can expect during the process of selling their home
- Gives the homeowner an in-depth look at the agent’s marketing and sales skills
- Provides statistical and social proof of the agent’s successful track record
- Gives the homeowner a realistic view of the marketplace and how it relates to their property
It is also a good idea to send a prelisting package at least a couple of days ahead of your first meeting with a potential client. This way, the sellers have a chance to review the prelisting package before the actual listing presentation.
Examples of Prelisting Packages
Bottom Line
Your prelisting package is one of the most effective and powerful real estate lead generation tools you can create, so spending some time and money to make it shine can positively impact your entire business. By creating different real estate prelisting packages for different types of homesellers, and including the right information, you’ll maximize your chances of converting real estate leads into real estate listings.
