If you commit yourself to delivering a premium listing, trying to cheap it out will instruct you in the previously-unknown 23rd Immutable Law of Marketing: Anti-marketing is worse than no marketing

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Idea-by-idea, house-by-house, we are writing the book on the art of listing premium-priced homes for sale. The things we do are often beyond useless at lower price points, and we’re not a part of the canapes and cocktails circuit where high-end homes are sold. But for executive homes, luxury homes, historic and architecturally-distinctive homes, the kinds of marketing tools we are perfecting are very effective.

Effective at what? At selling the house, of course. Everything we do is about selling the house. If we happen to make a strong impression on the neighbors or on other people who see the work we are doing, so much the better. Even so, that’s not the point. People should be impressed by the commitment we make to selling our listings, but our purpose in making that commitment is to get the house sold.

Here’s a true fact, apparently known to everyone except real estate agents: Consumers — the people we hope to make our clients — see us as being lazy and cheap. They think we’re overpaid, but it’s probably less that they think our paychecks are too big and more that they don’t see any effort on our part to justify those paychecks.

A typical listing is a lockbox and a sign. Is there a flyer? Or is there just an empty flyer box? Has the flyer been edited with a ballpoint pen to reflect price reductions? How many photos are there in the MLS listing — and are they any damned good?

The marginal cost of everything I’ve talked about so far is essentially nothing, amortized over a few dozen listings. The one exigent out-of-pocket cost might be the post for the sign, and I have seen real estate signs nailed to trees. I wish I were joking.

If consumers see us as being lazy and cheap, it’s only because far too many of us are lazy and cheap when it comes to servicing our clients. It’s comical, actually. The Realtor who pisses away $5,000 acquiring a client worth $10,000 in gross commission income can’t bring himself to spend fifty bucks out-of-pocket on that client.

There’s a whole universe of error in there that I plan to erase. One of the long-term benefits I expect to reap by talking so openly about our listing praxis is to educate consumers about the kinds of marketing efforts they should expect and demand from their listing agents. I’m always delighted to hear from a BloodhoundBlog reader who has adopted one or more of our tactics, but my expectation, in the long run, is that everyone will be working our way or better, because sellers won’t accept less from listers.

But, for now, doing more for the money is a very potent marketing strategy — especially for homes selling from the mid to high six-figures. Sellers understand how much money they’re going to be paying their listing agent, and they want to know what they’re going to be getting for that kind of dough. The stronger your answers to those kinds of questions — particularly if you bring marketing ideas they haven’t heard before — the stronger your position in competing for the listing.

However: There is a caveat. If you’re going to adopt the kinds of marketing tactics we deploy, you have to understand what we are doing and why. And, more importantly, you have to do things all the way. If your reaction to our kinds of ideas is to think, “Now how can I pull that off on the cheap?” — stand down. The strategy that I write about really is a strategy, not a collection of disparate tactics, and one of the reasons that it works as well as it does is that it represents such a total commitment to getting the home sold.

When you say, “A lockbox and a sign, take it or leave it,” you are marketing to your client’s expectations, as low as they might be. When you say, “Total commitment to getting the home sold,” you are marketing against their expectations — and you had better be prepared to deliver. If you say “total commitment” and immediately start trying to cheap things out, you are a much bigger disappointment, in your client’s eyes, than the bum who said “take it or leave it.”

And thus do we come to the previously-unknown 23rd Immutable Law of Marketing: Anti-marketing is worse than no marketing. If you’re not willing to make the total commitment, don’t say that you are. If your purpose in taking the listing is to latch onto some sign calls, don’t tell your sellers that your goal is to sell their house. We go around mouthing the slogan, “Under-promise, over-deliver,” but if you over-promise to get the listing, then under-deliver to minimize your time- or cost-commitment, you will not only destroy your relationship with the seller, you will damage your reputation with everyone the seller knows. The cheap, lazy bum of a lister will come off looking better than you. At least the seller knew he was a cheap, lazy bum going in.

Marketing against expectations is damned difficult. Ries and Trout would say it’s impossible. But Diogenes wants to believe there’s an honest man out there. That single-mom wants to believe there’s a decent guy out there who can love her and do right by her kids, too. And there are millions of very prosperous home-owners who are desperate to believe that there is a Realtor out there, somewhere, who will represent their interests, who will do everything it takes — and spend anything it takes — to get their home sold.

If you’re willing to deliver the goods, you can build yourself a solid business by making your clients’ dreams come true.

But if you’re not willing to follow through all the way, you’ll do yourself more harm than good by portraying yourself as Prince Charming on a White Charger. A dashed hope is worse than no hope, and a betrayal of remarkable promises will impress your name on your client’s memory in a way no mere pantomime of shuffling mediocrity ever could.

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