What Should You Put in Your Listing Presentation?

By Katie Taylor & James Goodman

With a combined 30 years of experience in the real estate industry, Katie and James lead the Goodman Taylor Team, one of the top-performing teams in the Greater Phoenix area.

There’s a version of the listing appointment that goes badly and doesn’t look like it. The seller is polite. They nod at the marketing plan. Then 20 minutes in, they ask the question they’ve been sitting on since you rang the doorbell, and you realize the answer isn’t anywhere in the deck.

That question changed in August 2024, and a surprising number of presentations never noticed.

The rules that moved everything. Offers of compensation came off the MLS, and written buyer agreements became mandatory before a buyer tours a home. On paper, that’s a form change, which is exactly how most of the industry treated it.

What it actually did was relocate a conversation. Compensation used to live in a database field, decided upstream of the kitchen table, so the kitchen table never had to host it. Take the field away, and the conversation doesn’t disappear. It moves to the only place left, which is a chair across from your seller.

And your seller has done homework. Not necessarily good homework. They’ve read something about the settlement, they have a half-formed theory, and they’re waiting to see whether you confirm it or correct it.

Which means the deck has a job it didn’t have three years ago. Here’s what that changes.

The question they’re actually asking. Most agents misread that homework. The seller isn’t wondering what you charge. They can find that out in 11 seconds by asking. What they’re wondering is what happens when a buyer’s agent turns up holding a signed agreement that says someone owes them a fee, and whether that someone is them.

Different question. Different stakes. And it’s the one that decides whether they trust you, because it’s the one where they can tell instantly if you’re improvising.

Most presentations don’t answer it. Most don’t acknowledge it exists.

Put compensation near the front. The old logic for burying it at the back was sound. The number was already handled, so the conversation was a formality on the way to the signature. That logic is gone, and the slide order never got the memo.

Leave it at the end now, and you’ve spent 40 minutes performing for someone who stopped listening on slide four. Not because your marketing plan is bad. Because a person with an unanswered question doesn’t absorb anything until it’s answered. Move it up, and you get their attention back for everything that follows.

Then actually answer it. Compensation is negotiable, always has been, and saying so is not an answer. It’s a deflection wearing an answer’s clothes. Your seller needs four things: what you charge, what that buys them, whether they’re expected to put anything toward the buyer’s side, and what happens if they decide not to. If you need a slide to get through those, you don’t know them well enough yet.

Build the slide nobody has. Nearly every buyer touring their house has a signed agreement stating what their agent gets paid. Your seller almost certainly doesn’t know that. If they’ve heard something, they’ve probably landed on “so I don’t pay the buyer’s agent anymore,” which is close enough to true to be dangerous and far enough from true to blow up on day 42.

So take them through it while the stakes are hypothetical. What a buyer agreement is. What it looks like when an offer arrives asking them to contribute to that fee. What their choices are, and what each one costs them in net proceeds.

Notice what you’re not doing. You’re not telling them what to decide. You’re showing them a decision exists, early, while there’s no offer on the table and no clock running. Nobody resents that conversation. They resent the version where they meet the decision inside a live negotiation and have to make it in an afternoon.

There’s a side effect worth having, too. Explain your fee, and you’re an agent explaining a fee. Explain the whole board, and you’re the person who saw around a corner they didn’t know was there. Those are not the same job interview.

Then cut the rest, which is most of it. This is the part that stings, so here it is plainly. The majority of what’s in your presentation is about you, and none of it is earning its place.

Production numbers. Awards. The brokerage’s national footprint. That grid of portal logos showing where the listing syndicates, which every agent has, which is identical, and which no seller has ever chosen an agent over. They watched two other people present the same slides in the same order this week. It’s wallpaper.

There are maybe five questions a seller actually has. What’s my house worth, and how did you get there? What do you do that gets it sold? What does this cost me? What happens when a buyer’s agent asks me for money? What goes wrong, and how do you handle it? That’s the deck. Everything else is there to make you feel armored, and armor isn’t the same thing as being ready.

The agents taking listings right now aren’t the ones with the most slides. They’re the ones who walk in with the fewest and the clearest, because the deck was never the point. Sellers aren’t buying a presentation. They’re deciding whether you understood their situation before you got there.

So go read your own file. Not as the person who built it. As the seller sitting across from it, with their questions, in this market, this year. If it’s answering 2023, it needs rebuilding, and that’s a better afternoon than losing a listing to someone who did.

This is the kind of thing we work through with the agents around us, because the presentation isn’t where you win the listing. It’s where you find out whether you were paying attention beforehand.

If you’re reworking yours and want a second set of eyes, reach out. Call or text us at (480) 612-5866, or email us at james@theeverydayagent.com. More of how we think about this is at theeverydayagent.com. Always happy to talk shop with another agent.