Ahhh...the coveted listing.

Having a great number of listings often means a solid opportunity for you to make great money. But how do you handle your owners when weeks or months down the road you still haven't moved their property? If you're like many agents, you may tend to avoid your owners instead of continually staying in communication with them.

After all, it can feel embarrassing when you've convinced the owners that you were the best agent they could hire to market their property, and the property is still sitting on the market.

The root of the problem can often be that you've never designed a systematic approach for consistent follow-up with your owners after you've obtained listings from them. As agents it's easy to hope that we'll move our properties quickly after we list them, such that ongoing communication with our owners about why nothing has happened won't be necessary. But in reality, we all experience having listings that stay on the market for much longer than we originally anticipated.

Here's the solution:

Design a system for follow-up and communication with your owners to utilize whenever you sign new listings with them. And utilize the same system with every owner whose property you've listed, too. For example, immediately after you obtain a new listing, you might want to send out a "thank you" letter to your owners. One week after you've obtained the listing, you may want to send out a letter telling them you've put a sign on the property and that you've also put it in the multiple. Maybe two weeks after this you can tell your owners about any advertising you're doing to market their property. And then two weeks later, you can tell them who the property has been presented to and who has taken a tour of it. You might even include feedback that people have given on why the property wasn't the right one for them personally. This could definitely help you if you feel it's time to negotiate a reduction in the asking price.

The point is you want to be in regular communication with your owners when you've listed their properties, and not have them feel like you're ignoring them. If it becomes necessary to extend your listing with them, you'll be more likely to have them agree to this if you've been in regular communication with them. If they hardly ever hear from you, it's easy for them to conclude that you haven't been doing anything to market their property for them. And if they get to the point where they feel this way, almost any one of your competitors will now seem like a better choice to list their property with than you.

So structure a program of how you can follow-up with your owners every 1-2 weeks or so throughout the duration of your listing. Sometimes your follow-up may consist of written letters to your owners, sometimes it may be a phone call, or sometimes it might even be an E-mail. But the point is to stay in communication with them. You may even want to have a checklist you follow for every week during the listing period of each property. The checklist will then be exactly the same for every property you have listed. All that will matter is how many weeks you are into the listing period for each property, and what the appropriate communication is to make to your owners on each particular property that week.

You could even consider having part of your follow-up campaign on each property delivered by an E-mail drip campaign. Just program the individual follow-up messages into the campaign in advance, and begin the drip campaign whenever you obtain a new listing. The system will personalize each E-mail message to your individual owners according to how you've already entered their personal information.

Once you design a system of weekly or biweekly follow-up, you then know what follow-up you need to do every week on each one of your listings. Ideally you'll have your assistant or virtual assistant take care of all of this for you, too. This way your follow-up gets done on schedule, your owners feel that you're in good communication with them, and you're focusing more of your time and energy on continually creating new business.

In closing, oftentimes the problems we face as real estate agents can be resolved by putting a system in place to handle the situation effectively. Once you do this with your follow-up on listings, you'll feel better, you'll be in better relationship with your owners, and you'll be in a much better position to extend your listings whenever this is necessary.