How to Keep Talking About Your Home Listings After They’ve Sold

Aug 28

When business is slow and you don’t have any new listings for the foreseeable future, how can you keep talking about your home listings even after they’ve sold?

Typically, real estate agents want to look busy, even when they’re not. (Well, that is, the perfect amount of busy—you’re super successful, but you also have time for new clients, right? It can be hard to strike the right balance.) The good news is that there are a ton of ways to keep talking about home listings, even when you don’t have any.

In this post, I am sharing 4 ways that you can talk about your previous listings. Many of your listings present excellent marketing opportunities. Yes—even after they’ve sold.

Before we dive into the specific marketing ideas, I want to address a question that I get all the time:

Is it ok to talk about my old listings?

My answer to this is YES, absolutely! Of course, you don’t want to misrepresent anything (you’ll want to make it clear that this is an already SOLD home). But sharing the story behind selling a home is content you can post pretty much anytime. My opinion is that you can even share the story of a listing from a few years ago. Yes, you read that right. I promise that almost no one is going to remember that it was from a while ago (except for the sellers and maybe a few colleagues), and if they remember, I doubt they’re going to be bothered by you posting about it again!

Let’s just say I have never seen a realtor market a listing TOO much. And I follow a lot of realtors. The truth is, it can take a lot of work to get people to even see our marketing in the first place. (I challenge you to try and annoy someone by posting your (high-quality!) marketing too much, ha ha.)

There you have it—I wanted to get that out of the way before I dive in.

Also keep in mind that while the ideas I share in this post are geared toward agents who list homes, many of these same concepts can easily be applied to buyer agents.

Here are 4 ways you can keep talking about your listings in your marketing, even after they’ve sold:

1. Tell the story of the transaction.

You may already know that I’m all about telling stories in your marketing. (In fact, I teach an entire workshop about how to tell stories in your social media captions.) Something I teach in the class is that you can tell stories almost anytime—when business is slow, when you feel like you have nothing to talk about in your marketing, when you want to attract more of a certain type of client, etc.

So, how do you tell a story about a sold home?

First, look at homes you’ve recently sold. You can even include homes that you sold a couple of years ago. Choose a few to focus on for now. Most realtors have many untold stories about their home listings to share, and many of these are stories that will demonstrate your expertise, entertain your followers, show off your personality and what it’s like to work with you, and more.

There are many ways to tell the story of a transaction. You could focus on everything that went into preparing the home for listing day. You could focus on all of the marketing you did to market a particular home. You could focus on what it was like to receive offers, choose an offer, and guide the sale to closing day. Those are just a few examples—the sky's the limit here!

If you feel like you need an “excuse” to revisit transactions, frame it as a “Behind the Scenes of My 2024 Home Listings” series, and roll it out during December (for example). Use ChatGPT for series name ideas and inspiration!

Hot tip: If you had any listings that were your IDEAL listing (a home with a location, price point, style, etc. that you would like to list more of), spend extra extra energy telling its story.

2. Use your previous listings as an education opportunity.

Instead of sharing generic information about selling homes, use your actual past listings and real life experiences to demonstrate what you mean. Show vs. tell!

Let’s say you’re talking about how important it is to make strategic updates to your home. Instead of having this be a generic post about possible updates someone could make, tell a brief story about a listing. Talk about how you met with the sellers, toured their home, and put together a list of maintenance to dos and updates that would get the best ROI. Share the specifics of what was on the list: Update carpeting, paint home interior, install new gutters, replace trim work in kitchen, install new light fixtures in bathroom. Even better if you have before and after photos to share (but if you don’t, the listing photos will do just fine!).

Not only is this type of post educating future seller clients, but it’s demonstrating one of the very valuable services that you offer. Most realtors don’t show up to a perfect home that’s market ready; oftentimes there’s a process where you are drawing on your expertise. You probably also work with buyers, so you know exactly what they care about (and therefore where it’s worth spending some money on updates) and what won’t matter as much (so you can prevent your seller clients from doing a huge kitchen remodel when they only needed new counters and some stylish light fixtures).

Sharing real life examples allows people to relate better, is more memorable, and is not only a teaching moment, but it helps to build trust (you know what you’re doing!) and show off your expertise (look at all of those smart and savvy details you shared!).

3. Share a testimonial along with info about the transaction.

If you received a testimonial from your seller client, you can share it along with info about the transaction. Again, you can do this almost anytime—even if the transaction was from earlier in the year or last year!

Bonus tip: If you had a happy seller who hasn’t shared a testimonial about working with you yet, now is a great opportunity to ask for a review. Let your clients know that you want to share the story of the sale, and use this opportunity to check in with them, see how they’re loving their home, and start a conversation.

4. The end of the year is the perfect time for a recap of all of the listings you sold that year.

If you feel proud of how many seller clients you served throughout the year, December is the perfect time to show that off. Put together a collage with photos of each home you sold, and in the caption you can write a list of the neighborhoods/cities that the homes were located in (for example).

Don’t be afraid to brag a little, too; you can frame your message here as something along the lines of “I’m so happy I was able to help # clients move onto their next chapter” instead of “I sold _this many_ homes, isn’t that amazing?!” You catch my drift.

You can also use this opportunity to tag your clients in the post and DM the post to them with a message, and see how they’ve been doing.

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FYI: If you’re reading all of this and thinking, dang I wish I had more photos to share, this is a great reminder that this next year, you want to take as many photos + videos as possible. You never know when they’ll be handy. Get in the habit of taking pictures all the time! Photos of you with your listing, you and your clients, your clients, your clients’ pets, before staging, before updates, before landscaping. All of it. It’s better to have more photos than not enough.

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If you’d like to learn more about how to tell the story of a time when you helped a buyer or seller, take a moment to learn more about “Creating Captions That Connect: A Writer’s Workshop for Real Estate Agents.” In this workshop, you will learn the step-by-step process for how to tell stories in your real estate marketing. Learn more here.