The Part of Your Presentation You Have Never Timed

Most agents can describe their listing presentation in detail. The order of it, the materials, the part they are proud of, the part they would like to improve.

Very few can say how many of the sixty minutes they spent talking. It is the one number nobody collects, and it quietly decides how much of the appointment was useful.

You cannot judge this from memory

Memory is a poor instrument here, and it fails in a predictable direction. When you are speaking you are occupied, so the time passes quickly and feels shorter than it was. When you are listening you are waiting, so the same minutes feel longer. Almost everybody who estimates their own talking time estimates it low.

The fix is unglamorous. Ask permission to record your next appointment, or leave a timer running and note the minutes, or take a trusted colleague who does nothing but count. Any of the three will tell you more about your presentation than another evening spent rewriting it.

What the client can tell you in the time that is left

The point of measuring is not to reach a correct ratio. It is to see how much room was left for the seller to say something you did not already know. Everything that makes the rest of the engagement work sits in that room. Why they are moving and whether the reason is firm. What the last agent did that they did not like. Which of the two of them is less certain about selling at all. What they would quietly accept, as against what they have told you they want.

None of that arrives while you are presenting. It arrives in the pauses, and if there are no pauses there is nothing to arrive into.

The presentation is not the proof

A thorough presentation feels like the thing that wins the instruction, because it is the part you prepared and the part you can control. From the other side of the table it often reads differently. A seller who has seen three agents this week has heard three presentations, and they blur. What does not blur is the agent who asked them something nobody else asked and then waited for the answer.

That is worth testing rather than taking on trust. Think back to the last listing you won against competition and ask what the client actually referred to afterwards when they explained their choice. It is rarely the marketing schedule.

Where the minutes usually go

When agents do measure this, the time tends to disappear in three familiar places. Credentials, which are established in far less time than most of us give them. Process, explained in full when the client only needed to know it exists and that you will walk them through it. And answers to questions that were never asked, offered because silence is uncomfortable.

Each of those can be shortened without losing anything, and the minutes they return are the minutes you can spend on the questions that only this particular seller can answer. They are also the hardest minutes to win back later, because once the appointment is over the chance to ask has gone with it.

A question to sit with this week

In your next appointment, count the minutes you speak and the minutes they speak. When you look at those two numbers afterwards, what did the client tell you that you could not have known before you arrived, and did the balance of the hour give them room to tell you?

If you want to work on the appointment itself

If you would like to go through a recent appointment with someone and look at where the hour went, you can book a discovery call.