Do agents actually pay for listing presentations, or do they only pay for the listing photos?

Question

I've been calling around asking agents what marketing work they outsource, because I'm trying to figure out whether there's a service here I could learn. Four of the six I talked to pay a photographer and nothing else. The other two pay someone monthly for social posts and a listing presentation template they refill themselves.

So the question I can't settle. If I wanted to sell marketing to agents, is the presentation work (the deck you bring to a seller to win the listing) a real paid product, or is it a thing agents insist on doing themselves because it's their pitch and their face?

Case for real: agents are competing harder for listings and have to explain what they charge more explicitly than they used to. A better deck helps with that. Case against: it's cheap to make a decent one now with the tools they already have, and the money is in photos because nobody can fake a photo.

I genuinely don't know which way this goes and I don't want to build a service around the wrong half.

monica_tran3 · Answer

Both halves are real, they just sell to different agents. Photos sell to everyone because it's per listing and the agent can bill it against the listing. Presentation work sells to a much smaller group, the agents who take a lot of listing appointments and lose some of them. That's maybe one in six of the agents you called.

Five years in, my per-listing work funds the business and my presentation work is where the margin is. But I had to stop pitching presentations to agents who take four listings a year. They don't lose enough appointments to care.

paulgrant17 · Answer

Dumb question from someone with no agent side at all, what's actually in a listing presentation? Is it a price opinion or is it a brochure about the agent?

gregpowell66 · Answer

@wren it's mostly the agent, with market data wrapped around it. Comps, days on market, what they'd do to prep the house, then several pages of why them. I've sat through three of them as a seller on my own flips.

And @ember, the thing that actually differed between the three wasn't design quality. Two of them handed me a template with my address dropped in. The one I picked had walked the house first and had a page on what the kitchen would do to the comps. That page is the product. Nobody's tools generate that page for them because it needs someone to have looked at the house.

nataliehsu · Answer

@girder that's the part that makes me nervous about it as a business, though. If the value is in someone walking the house, then the agent has to walk it or you have to walk it, and either way you can't do forty of those a month. Photos scale. Judgment doesn't.

tonyv88 · Answer

On the management side I see the tail end of this. The agents who keep sending me tenants after a sale are the ones with a brand I can actually describe, and the ones who vanish are the ones whose stuff all looks the same.

@plumb you don't have to walk the house. You build the frame and the agent fills the one page that needs eyes. I'd pay for that if I were listing. What I wouldn't pay for is a deck I have to rewrite anyway.

Do agents actually pay for listing presentations, or do they only pay for the listing photos?

5 replies