Stop 6 of 8 · Weekly
Open house and past-client follow-up
Forty names off a sign-in sheet into forty short notes that sound like you, plus the once a year message to past clients that actually gets a reply.
Sunday, two to four
Daniel leaves an open house with a sheet of forty names, half of them neighbours, a few of them real, and a page of scribbles about who asked what. By Tuesday the sheet is in a drawer. Everyone in this business knows the follow-up matters and almost nobody does forty of them.
Forty short notes is now about fifteen minutes, and the thing that makes them work is available on the sheet itself: what each person asked while they were standing in the kitchen.
What the sheet gives you
| Column | What it changes in the note |
|---|---|
| Working with an agent, yes or no | Whether there is any ask at all |
| Looking to buy, sell, or a neighbour | Which of three notes they get |
| Your scribble about what they asked | The one line that proves a person wrote it |
[attach a photo of the sign-in sheet and your notes] Read this open house sign-in sheet. Sort the visitors into three groups: represented by another agent, unrepresented buyers, and neighbours. Then write one follow-up per person, under seventy words each, in my voice. Every note refers to the specific thing that person asked or looked at from my notes. No price, no rate, no payment, no market prediction, nothing about the seller. Represented visitors get a thank you and the answer to their question and no ask. Unrepresented buyers get one question about their timing. Neighbours get an offer to send them what the house eventually sells for. List anyone whose handwriting you could not read rather than guessing at it.
Once a year, on purpose
The past client list is the business, and it goes quiet because the annual message is hard to write forty times without sounding like a mailer. The fix is the same one: the note is anchored to their transaction, not to the market.
[paste the row from my CRM: first name, month and year they closed, property type, one thing I remember] Write a note under eighty words for a past client on the anniversary of their purchase. Mention the specific thing I noted about their move. Ask one question about the house now. No market update, no statistics, no referral ask, no price. Sign off the way I would in a text to someone I like.
The referral ask, separately
The ask goes in a different message a few weeks later, once they have replied, and it names a person rather than asking for one in general: someone in their building, someone at their office who has mentioned moving. Specific asks get answers, general ones get goodwill.
The flyer
Give me the copy for a one page open house flyer for [the Cortez listing]: a headline under eight words, three feature lines of six words or fewer taken from the listing package, the open house day and time [times], and the required disclosure and Equal Housing Lender line from my compliance file. Run a fair housing pass on the headline and the feature lines. Leave the price as [price] for me to fill in.