Email courses for estate and real estate agents

Your reader is a year away, and a free valuation is written for somebody else

Somebody thinking about selling starts thinking about it long before they act. They look at listings, they wonder what the extension was worth, they argue about it at Christmas, and eleven months later they call two agents in a week. Everything between those two moments is unattended, and it is where the decision is actually made.

A free valuation does not serve that period. It is an offer aimed at the last fortnight of a year-long process, it requires a telephone number, and everybody who has given one to a property website knows what happens next. Offering it to somebody eleven months out asks for a commitment they cannot make in exchange for information they cannot use yet.

A five-day course fits the gap exactly, because during it the reader does not want a number for their house. They want to understand how the number is arrived at, which is something they can apply themselves, repeatedly, for as long as the wondering goes on.

What the five days should teach

Teach how the price of their own street is set, from the records that are public where you work. What differed between the top and the bottom of the last four sales, what the local search will raise, what a survey finds in houses of that age. The method is the point: an agent who hands over the method is not an agent who has to be believed.

Before you write day one, find out what your reader can actually look up. In England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland the sold price of an individual house is published and free. In much of the United States it is not: the non-disclosure states — Texas, Louisiana, Missouri, Kansas, Idaho, Utah, Wyoming, New Mexico, Montana, North Dakota, Alaska and others -- publish no sale price at all, and the sold figures you have are MLS data your own rules may forbid you to republish. Teaching from a register that does not exist where your reader lives is the fastest way to lose them, and republishing MLS sold data where the register is missing is a rules problem rather than a writing one. Where prices are not public, build the same five days on what is: asking prices over time, days on market, what was withdrawn and relisted, and what you may lawfully say about what you sold.

Stay local and be specific about it. National advice about presentation is worthless and every reader has met it three times. What only you can write is what happens in your six streets: which catchment moved, what the flats on the corner did to the ground-floor flats opposite, why the terraces on one side of the road survey badly.

Include the part that costs you something. Which improvements do not return their cost around here, when not to sell, what a chain actually does to a timeline. An agent who tells a reader in April that the loft conversion will not come back is the agent that reader remembers in the following March.

Day four is the pricing mistake, and in this trade it is always the same one: asking high to leave room for negotiation. Show what it does to time on market and to the eventual figure, with local numbers. It is also, usefully, the mistake that the competitor who over-values to win the instruction is about to encourage.

The objection your readers arrive with

The objection is not about the writing. It is that handing over any details means somebody will ring, and it is correct, because that is what has happened every other time. It is the single reason an interested owner does not sign up, and no amount of useful content gets past it.

So answer it at the form and then honour it. Ask for an email address and nothing else. No telephone field, optional or otherwise, no property address, no dropdown asking when they are thinking of moving. Say in one plain sentence that nobody will call, because there will be no number to call.

The second objection is that the course is a valuation in disguise: five useful days ending in a visit that was the point all along. The answer is the day-six split. If most of your readers are a year out, most of them should be offered something that is not a visit, and saying so on the sign-up page removes the suspicion before it forms.

What your sign-up page has to say

Name the streets. A page about how prices are really set around here is a page for a stranger. A page that names the four roads and the estate is a page one particular owner recognises as being about their own house, and that narrowness is the whole advantage an independent agent has over a national portal.

Ask for the email address and stop. Every additional field costs sign-ups, and in this trade the telephone field costs more than all the others together because of what the reader believes it means. If you need a number later, ask the person who replied to you.

Say a confirmation email comes first and that clicking it is what starts the course. It is also the only consent record worth having here: a property list is built slowly, kept for years and mailed occasionally, which is exactly the shape in which addresses typed by somebody else sit unnoticed until a mailing goes badly wrong.

The lines a property sign-up page has to carry:

• The specific area the five days are about, named by street or estate rather than by town.
• That the form asks for an email address only, and that nobody will telephone.
• That no valuation, visit or appointment is any part of the five days.
• That the first email is a confirmation link, and the course begins once it is clicked.
• Where the numbers come from: name the register if sale prices are published where you work, and say plainly what you are using instead if they are not.
• What arrives afterwards, whether that is a monthly note of local sales or nothing at all.
• What day six is, and that it differs depending on how far off the reader is.

What the day-six email asks for

Split the ask by timeline, out loud. Most of your readers are months away, so the main ask is a reply: the one thing about their own property they are unsure about, answered in writing, with no visit attached. It costs you ten minutes, it starts a conversation with somebody genuinely thinking about selling, and it gives you a timeline you would otherwise have guessed at.

For the few who are close, describe what a valuation involves rather than offering one. How long it takes, what you look at, what you bring, and what you will tell them that they may not want to hear. A described appointment is a different proposition from a free one, and the reader who books a described appointment arrives unbraced.

Keep the long game as a third option and name it honestly: a short note whenever something on their street sells, with the price in it. It is genuinely useful, it is the only mailing an owner-in-waiting actually wants, and it keeps you present through the eleven months in which the decision gets made.