A homeowner replied to one of our circle prospecting emails with a question that every listing agent wants to hear: “Can you run the numbers and let me know?”
We had recently sold a home in the neighborhood and emailed 500 nearby homeowners to let them know about the sale. Thirty people replied, and one of those conversations turned into a listing appointment. Across several Just Listed, Just Sold and open house campaigns, we’ve now emailed roughly 2,000 neighbors and received 105 replies.
I know cold email isn’t the first thing most agents think about when marketing a listing. We’re accustomed to postcards, open houses, social media and door knocking, all of which still have a place in our business.
We haven’t stopped sending direct mail but I started wondering why we weren’t also using our listings as an opportunity to start conversations directly in homeowners’ inboxes.
Here’s the play we ran, including how you can recreate it without the software we used.
How to score listing appointments with circle prospecting emails
Start with a real reason to reach out
The neighborhood around a listing is one of the most logical places to prospect because people there have a natural interest in what’s selling nearby. For this campaign, we focused on 500 homeowners in Norwalk, California, around a property we’d just closed.
Our message wasn’t a generic introduction or an unsolicited valuation report. We told them we’d recently closed a nearby sale, explained that we’d seen more buyer interest than homes to show and offered to run the numbers if they’d considered selling.
NOTE: That buyer demand statement reflected our experience with the property so be mindful of borrowing language like that unless it’s true for your listing.
The subject line was the homeowner’s own address. Not a clever question or a manufactured sense of urgency, just an address they would immediately recognize.
The email read, in part:
Hi there, we just wrapped up a closing at [recently sold address] in the neighborhood.
Buyer demand nearby is very real right now. We had more interested buyers than homes to show them.
If you’ve wondered about selling [homeowner’s address], we’re happy to run the numbers while we’re in the area.
We included our brokerage and contact information and a way to opt out. The email was short because we weren’t trying to explain the entire market or convince someone to list on the spot. We wanted to give them a relevant reason to reply.
How to build the campaign yourself
We used Grassfed.AI to find homeowner contact information, personalize the messages and handle sending. I haven’t personally run this exact process manually, so I don’t want to pretend I have, but the basic workflow is something agents can put together with separate tools.
First, use your title rep to identify the homes surrounding a listing. A list of 100 nearby properties is a reasonable place to begin if 500 feels overwhelming.
Then match those properties with ownership information and use a reputable contact-data provider to locate available homeowner emails. You’ll need to verify the addresses with a service such as MillionVerifier, since bad data can hurt deliverability and waste your time.
Next, set up a business email account with proper domain authentication. If you’re planning a larger campaign, a sequencing platform can help organize personalized messages and replies, although you should follow your provider’s sending rules and increase volume gradually rather than assuming a new inbox is ready to send hundreds of emails.
Keep a spreadsheet of addresses, sending status, responses and opt-outs. This is not something you want to send from your personal email address because the worst thing would be destroying its deliverability in the future.
Before sending, make sure the campaign complies with applicable commercial email and privacy requirements, including accurate sender details, a physical mailing address and a functioning opt-out process. An email verification service tells you whether an address is likely deliverable; it doesn’t establish permission to contact someone.
The follow-up is where the appointment happened
The replies weren’t all listing leads. Some homeowners asked about their property values, some said they weren’t ready, and a few asked not to be contacted again. We respected those requests.
One homeowner, though, wrote back asking us to run the numbers and even copied a second email address they checked more often. Rather than immediately sending a CMA based on public information, I replied: “Absolutely. Do you have time for a quick call tomorrow so I can ask a couple questions about the condition of the house?”
That question moved us from an email exchange to a real conversation and, ultimately, a listing appointment. It also gave me a chance to understand the homeowner’s circumstances before deciding what information would actually help them.
We received 30 replies from the first 500 emails, a 6 percent response rate. The broader campaigns have generated 105 replies from approximately 2,000 emails, or about 5.25 percent. Those aren’t promises of what another agent will achieve, and not every reply represents a prospective seller. What mattered to me was that we created conversations with people we otherwise might not have reached.
I’m not replacing postcards or open houses with circle prospecting emails. I’m adding another way for neighbors to engage with our marketing and making sure someone on our team is ready when they do. If you’re going to try this, start small, measure actual replies rather than just opens, and pay as much attention to your follow-up as you do to the technology.
A listing gives you a reason to reach out. What you do when someone answers is where the next opportunity begins.
Krys Benyamein is a Realtor with Allstars Realty in Southern California. Get connected on Instagram or LinkedIn.
