3 Things Every Real Estate Assistant Needs to Know About Marketing a Listing

Finding potential buyers for your listings is one of the most important aspects of a real estate agent’s job — and marketing is essential to their success with this task. As an assistant, your role will be to use marketing to attract and secure new customers for your agent’s business, and once engaged with a client, you’ll use marketing to sell properties.

Tools of the Trade

In this blog post, we’ll focus on three things every real estate assistant needs to know about marketing their agent’s listings.

#1. Multiple Listing Service (MLS)

The first place you’ll want to put a listing is in the MLS, or Multiple Listing Service. This central database of listings allows home sellers a centralized location to post details on the properties they have for sale and is an industry standard.

Accuracy in preparing a listing cannot be overstated. Not only is the MLS the central location for your listing, but listing sheets are generated directly from the system and sent to agents and buyers.

Also, websites that are accessible to any potential home buyer, such as Trulia, Zillow and Realtor.com, use the data directly from the MLS. So remember to check and double-check that the specifications and descriptions for the site are exactly as you want them.

Besides the standard form data, which includes details on the home such as square footage and the number of rooms, you’ll have an opportunity to provide a 1,000-character description. This description will appear on the listing sheet and on any websites that pick up MLS data. It’s important that this copy sells the home, and should be treated like any other marketing material.

#2. Photography

Photography is one of the most important parts of your marketing plan and should be handled with care. You may consider outsourcing the photographs to a professional photography company like VHT Studios. Along with ensuring that your photographs are of the best quality, there are a number of other concerns when preparing your photos to upload. Use this checklist to make sure your photos are ready for the market.

  1. Photos should be beautifully lit, color-corrected, cropped properly and show off your property’s best qualities.
  2. Individual photos can be no larger than 10 megabytes.
  3. The image size can be no larger than 2880 x 2880 pixels.

Most MLS allow a limit of 25 photos, but don’t confuse quantity with quality. A photo of the exterior of the home is standard, and a good strategy for the other photos is to have at least one photo per each feature mentioned in your description. For example, a description that mentions an attached garage, a bay window and high ceilings should have photographs that show each of these features.

#3. Social Media

The most popular social media used in real estate are Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest. Your agent might use one, some or all of these. Each platform comes with its own set of analytics, so you can easily see if your postings are effective in driving engagement and, ultimately, sales.

Facebook and Twitter allow you to schedule posts, but if you’re using more than one platform, a dashboard like Hootsuite allows you to generate all your posts from a central location. Depending on your subscription level, you can easily replicate posts across platforms and receive great analytics to help you determine how well your posts are performing.

Facebook and Twitter allow you to schedule posts, but if you’re using more than one platform, a dashboard like Hootsuite allows you to generate all your posts from a central location. Depending on your subscription level, you can easily replicate posts across platforms and receive great analytics to help you determine how well your posts are performing.

There are four general pillars to consider when using social media across all platforms.

Accuracy

The Internet is unforgiving of typos, broken links and other inaccuracies, any of which can also cost your brand credibility and trust. When a posting about one of your listings contains errors, it can negatively affect your chances of a sale. When posting about your business or brokerage, it can damage the perception of your brand. Check and double-check before you post content online.

Relevancy

Social media is a crowded landscape with a significant amount of content competing for an audience. The more relevant your content is, the more likely it is to drive engagement. Engagement can help your business even if it doesn’t directly lead to a sale. Make sure that each and everything you post has some value to your reader.

Positivity

Never engage in negativity online. Avoid controversial topics like politics or religion, and never disparage one of your clients or competitors. Bring value to your audience by staying upbeat and sharing more positive content. If it’s a beautiful day in a neighborhood where you have a property, share a photo with your audience. If you’re involved in a community fundraiser or charity event in support of a favorite cause, invite others to attend as well.

Personality

Social media is an opportunity to share your unique personality. An Instagram photo of your agency serving meals to the homeless shows that you’re compassionate; a Facebook post about your team attending a baseball game shows that you’re fun. These are qualities that a client wants in a real estate agent, and social media is a great way to show them off.

A marketing plan can have multiple other pieces, including brochures, floor plans and open houses. To learn more about an assistant’s role in marketing real estate listings, view the full course here.

Explore the entire AgentEDU Assistants track today, which features eight different courses designed to provide real estate assistants with the most comprehensive online training available.


AgentEDU® is a platform where agents at every level can come to watch 10-minute video courses for the many situations that successful agents must master. From essential to advanced level and everything in between, AgentEDU® courses help agents become top producers with increased earnings and a plan for continued growth.

AgentEDU® is an Agent Publishing brand. For nearly two decades, Agent Publishing has been committed to providing residential real estate professionals with the information and training required to build successful and meaningful careers in their local markets. Agent Publishing’s influence extends to every career stage and reaches agents across print, digital, events and online learning.

How to Connect with First Time Homebuyers

For the first time in over a decade, there seems to be an influx of first-time home buyers entering the marketplace. But is it more than just anecdotal? Are more first time buyers actually in a position to purchase, and if so, what does it mean for agents?

Best First-Time Homebuyer Market Since 2006

In 2017, more than 2 million new or existing homes were purchased by first-time homebuyers, according to the First-Time Homebuyer Market Report from Genworth Mortgage Insurance, an operating segment of Genworth Financial, Inc.

The report, which measured data from the fourth quarter of 2017, revealed the number of homes purchased by first-time buyers increased nearly 7 percent from the same time in 2016, making last year the best for the first-time homebuyer market since 2006.

“The first-time homebuyer segment had one of its strongest years on record, and we expect it to continue growing in market share and driving the purchase market in 2018,” says Tian Liu, chief economist at Genworth Mortgage Insurance. “Since 2014, the segment has accounted for 82 percent of home purchases, but is still facing many headwinds.”

Unique Group with Unique Needs

First-time homebuyers are a unique group — one  that has its own set of needs that you as an agent must be prepare to address. That’s why we created the two-part training course, How to Find the Perfect Home for Your Clients.

The most common complaint that buyers will about their agents is that they were shown homes that did not fit their needs. Knowing how to find the right home for each client’s situation is a core skill that every buyer’s agent must possess.

Whether your client is a first-time homebuyer or an empty nester who is looking to downsize, you need to be prepared to understand the market — as well as how to set expectations, how to interpret the clues your client is giving you and how to eventually close the deal.

By guiding a first-time homebuyer through the sales process successfully, not only have you completed a sale and earned your commission, you may have landed a lifelong client.

Don’t miss your opportunity. Sign up for AgentEDU and learn how to find the perfect home for your clients.


AgentEDU® is a platform where agents at every level can come to watch 10-minute video courses for the many situations that successful agents must master. From essential to advanced level and everything in between, AgentEDU® courses help agents become top producers with increased earnings and a plan for continued growth.

AgentEDU® is an Agent Publishing brand. For nearly two decades, Agent Publishing has been committed to providing residential real estate professionals with the information and training required to build successful and meaningful careers in their local markets. Agent Publishing’s influence extends to every career stage and reaches agents across print, digital, events and online learning.