Most listing presentations describe marketing as a list of things a seller receives. That is fair enough as far as it goes, though it leaves out how the pieces depend on one another. Photography is stronger once the staging is settled, and a brochure is easier to design once the floor plans exist.
Here is the whole campaign, roughly in the order it comes together, and what each piece is for.
Before anything is photographed
The repairs worth making, and the ones that are not. A short list, agreed before the trades are booked, so nothing is spent on work a buyer will never notice. See Fixes and Repairs.
Staging, where the property calls for it. Not every home needs it and I will tell you plainly if yours does not. Where it helps, I work with stagers and interior designers on a plan suited to the house and to the buyer it is aimed at. Occupied homes usually need editing rather than furniture. See Staging and Interior Design.
A pre-listing home inspection. Commissioned early so it can be handed to buyers rather than discovered by them. It belongs in the marketing conversation because it changes how confidently people offer.
What gets made
Professional photography. The single highest-leverage line in the entire budget, because it is what decides whether anyone books a showing at all. A photographer, briefed on the house, shooting at the right time of day for the way the light falls. Twilight exteriors where the property earns them. See Photography, Not Pictures.
Video. A walkthrough that gives the sequence of rooms and the sense of moving through a home, which stills cannot do. It carries most of its weight on social and for buyers who cannot easily attend in person, including anyone relocating.
Floor plans, measured and drawn. Consistently among the most-clicked elements of any listing, because buyers want to know whether their furniture fits and where the bedrooms sit relative to each other before they spend a Saturday finding out.
The listing copy itself. Written rather than assembled from a checklist of features. It is read more times than anything else produced for your sale, and most of it in the first week.
A property brochure, designed around your home rather than around a grid, printed properly, and given to everyone who walks through it. It is the thing that leaves with them and sits on a kitchen table for a week.
A feature sheet for the hall table, with the floor plans, the inclusions, the utility costs and the details people ask about while standing in the kitchen.
A dedicated property website, with an address of its own, built for the house rather than a page on a portal. It is where the full photo set, the video, the floor plans and the inspection report all live in one place, and it is what I send to an agent who asks for more.
The iconic Chestnut Park lawn sign. Uniform across every property the firm lists, and deliberately so. It is a staple of central Toronto and the wider GTA, and after more than thirty years on lawns across the city it carries a recognition no individually designed board could. People know what it means before they read a word of it.
Still one of the most effective pieces on this list, because the person who wants to live on your street is often already travelling along it.
Where it goes
The listing itself, which lives on various platforms: MLS, realtor.ca, Chestnut Park's own search portal, and a range of third-party services. This is where the overwhelming majority of buyers conduct their searches, and everything above exists to make this one page work.
Printed flyers, delivered to neighbouring houses. Neighbours are not nosy so much as they are well-connected: they have a sister who wants to be closer, or friends who have been trying to get onto the street for two years. This is a genuinely productive channel and it is the one most agents skip.
Postcards to the wider neighbourhood. Delivered to mailboxes around your home. A proven way to manufacture interest within your neighbourhood.
Shopping the listing within Chestnut Park, before and at launch. The firm's agents work central Toronto at depth and are frequently sitting on a buyer who wants precisely your house.
Christie's International Real Estate, where the property warrants it. Reach well beyond the GTA, and the introduction already exists for a buyer arriving from elsewhere. Not every property needs this and I will not pretend otherwise.
Presence in the Globe and Mail, where the property warrants it. National reach and a readership that skews exactly toward the people buying significant homes. Not right for every listing, and where it is right it is worth doing properly rather than as a token eighth of a page.
Direct agent outreach. I go and find the agents who have shown comparable homes, who have buyers in the segment, and who lost out on the last three sales nearby. A phone call to the right ten agents does more than an advertisement seen by ten thousand strangers.
Getting people through the door
An agent open house, held first. Agents are the people with buyers already attached, they are honest with each other about price, and what they say in your kitchen is the earliest reliable read you will get on the market's opinion.
Public open houses, hosted properly and followed up on within twenty-four hours. Hosted by me, not handed to somebody who has never seen the house and cannot answer a question about the roof.
Private showings, with feedback requested from every agent who attends and passed on to you unedited, including the parts that are not flattering. See When the House Isn't Selling.
What I will not claim
Marketing does not fix price. A beautifully presented home at the wrong number is still a home at the wrong number, and no brochure has ever rescued one. The first three weeks are where most of a listing's serious attention arrives, and if the price is wrong, all a strong campaign does is show your house to more people who decline it.
What good marketing does is make certain that when the price is right, nothing between your house and the buyer is getting in the way. See The Right List Price.