If you’re going to spend the money, time and energy to throw a launch party for a new listing, the worst thing you can do is treat it like a three-hour open house.
I’ve done enough open houses to know how easy it is to fall into the usual routine. You announce the listing, post the open house on social media, send an email, put out some signs and hope enough people walk through the door to make all the effort feel worthwhile.
But when we recently launched a Spanish Hacienda in Chatsworth, the market was getting more challenging, and rates were moving higher. I didn’t want to simply throw a bigger open house. I wanted to figure out how to use the launch to create as much attention for the property as possible.
So we worked backward from those three hours.
We started marketing the event 10 days before it happened. We hit the neighborhood three different ways, published five pieces of social content, promoted the property on YouTube, ran paid advertising and put out 20 signs on launch day.
We built the event itself around one of the home’s most unusual features, its horse zoning, which is how a petting zoo ended up in the front yard of a $1.695 million listing.
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More than 50 people ultimately came through, including at least six neighbors, and two prospective buyers came back for second showings.
But the biggest lesson wasn’t how many people showed up. It was that the launch party gave us something most listings desperately need: a reason to keep talking about the property.
Once I saw that, I realized I had been thinking about the launch backward. The party wasn’t the marketing campaign. The party was the reason for the marketing campaign.
Start with the house before you start planning the party
Once we decided we wanted to do something bigger for the launch, we could have started with the usual questions: What should we serve? Should we get a DJ? Instead, we started with the property.
This particular house sits on nearly an acre and is zoned for horses. That’s not something you see every day in Los Angeles, and it was already one of the stories we wanted buyers to understand about the property.
So we brought in a petting zoo.
It gave families a reason to come, gave the neighbors something worth talking about and, most importantly, it didn’t feel completely disconnected from the house we were trying to sell.
That’s the part I would replicate, not the petting zoo.
If you’re launching a beach house, a downtown condo or a starter home in the suburbs, your answer should probably be completely different from mine. You don’t need to manufacture some giant spectacle. You need to figure out what makes the property interesting and ask yourself how you can turn that into something people can experience.
From experience I know that can work whether you have $300 to spend or $3,000. The goal isn’t to throw the coolest party. It’s to make the house more interesting to talk about.
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Give yourself a runway, not a launch date
Once we knew what the event was going to be, we worked backward from Saturday.
Ten days before the launch, the first social content went out. We mailed a letter to the neighborhood and started promoting the property on YouTube.
Seven days out, we posted again.
Six days before the event, another postcard went to the neighborhood. We continued promoting the launch three days before, the day before and again on the morning of the event. We also put roughly $120 behind social advertising.
What I liked about this cadence was that no individual piece had to do all the work.
By the time Saturday arrived, we weren’t introducing the event for the first time. We had spent 10 days building toward it.
That’s a big distinction, especially if you’re an agent who already throws great events. You may not need a better taco guy or a bigger balloon display. The biggest opportunity may be extending the life of what you’re already doing.
If you’re going to invest in three hours on Saturday, squeeze everything you can out of the 10 days surrounding it.
I would market to the neighbors like they’re their own audience
One of the most successful pieces of the launch had nothing to do with social media. We intentionally hit the surrounding neighborhood three separate ways.
The first was the plain text letter in an envelope we mailed 10 days before the event. The second was the postcard six days before. The third was a targeted neighborhood email campaign through grassfed.ai that reached 250 nearby homeowners and generated two direct responses.
At least six neighbors eventually came through the house.
For a newer agent, you may not have a huge database yet, but the listing gives you a legitimate reason to introduce yourself to hundreds of homeowners around it.
For the veteran with a large database and established market share, I would still ask whether one postcard is really enough. We gave the same audience three opportunities to notice us without sending them the exact same thing three times.
That is a strategy I will absolutely use again.
Spend money where it buys back your attention
Altogether, I spent approximately $2,800 on the launch.
The petting zoo was $1,200. Tacos and drinks were $700. Print and direct mail were approximately $800, and we spent around $100 on social advertising.
I don’t share those numbers because I think $2,800 is some magic budget for a successful launch. Depending on the listing and your business, $300 might make sense or $5,000 might make sense.
What mattered more to me was what I wasn’t doing.
Our taco vendor handled the food and the drinks. The petting zoo handled its own operation. I wasn’t running around buying ice, setting up catering or trying to solve someone else’s logistics while people were walking into the house.
I still got there at 10 a.m. for a noon launch because there was plenty for me to do. I put out 20 signs, set up the print material and sign-in sheet, made sure the QR codes were visible and used the TVs throughout the house to play music.
But all of those things supported the job I was actually there to do: sell the house.
That’s the filter I would use when deciding where to spend money. A vendor shouldn’t just add something to the event. Ideally, they should take something off your plate.
Because if a serious buyer walks in while you’re trying to refill the cooler, the party has started working against you.
Make it easy for people to engage however they want
One thing I’ve learned from doing open houses is that not everyone wants to interact with you the same way.
Some people walk in ready to talk. Others want to see every room before they tell you anything. A neighbor may just be curious about the price, while a serious buyer might want every detail about the property.
We had QR codes on our print material and another on the for-sale sign so someone could immediately access more information without having to find me.
We still used a sign-in sheet because I wanted to know who was coming through and have an opportunity to follow up afterward. I don’t think those two things compete with each other.
There is one thing I would absolutely change next time
I worked the launch alone.
With more than 50 people eventually coming through, that became the biggest operational mistake I made.
When the house got busy, I found myself trying to greet someone walking in while answering a question from someone else and keeping an eye on another person who seemed genuinely interested in the property.
That’s not where I want my attention divided.
Next time, I want at least one other person there whose primary job is helping with sign-in, greeting people and managing the flow of the event. If you’re newer and don’t have a team, that doesn’t mean you have to do it alone. Find another agent in your office or ask a lender who wants the opportunity to meet buyers and work it together.
The point of creating more traffic is not simply to have a crowded house. It’s to create more opportunities for conversations, and you need enough people there to actually have them.
You don’t need my budget or my petting zoo
If you’re preparing for your first listing, I don’t want you to finish this thinking you need to spend thousands of dollars to compete.
You don’t. Start with the house. Find something worth talking about. Give yourself enough time to tell people about it. Invite the neighborhood more than once. Create an experience appropriate for your budget. Put out more signs than you think you need, capture the people who come through, and follow up afterward.
If you’ve been selling real estate for 20 years and already know how to put 50 people through a launch, I’d look somewhere else. Look at everything surrounding those three hours.
- Could the event start generating attention 10 days earlier?
- Could you reach the neighborhood another way?
- Could one launch give you five pieces of content instead of one?
- Could better vendors free you up to spend more time with buyers?
- Could the follow-up be tighter?
That’s what this launch changed for me. I started out trying to figure out how to throw a better event for our seller. What I ended up realizing was that the event itself was only a small part of what we were creating.
Krys Benyamein is a Realtor with Allstars Realty in Southern California. Get connected on Instagram or LinkedIn.
