How we make your listing famous

"What we find is most people operate off of systems — it's just that most people are going off of their memory," Brian said. Without an actual system, "you're not going to really be able to scale your business or duplicate" what worked last time.

Foraker's version has a name: Make Your Listing Famous. Every listing gets the same steps, in the same order, whether it's a starter townhome or a farm on twenty acres.

Within days of a listing being signed, Foraker pulls public records for roughly the 500 closest neighbors and skip-traces the list for emails and phone numbers.

"First step, we're pulling public records and we're skip tracing all of those records to get emails and phone numbers," Kate explained.

That data goes to work before the home is even live on the MLS — a voicemail broadcast letting the neighborhood know first, a targeted Facebook ad built from the same contact list, and a hand-addressed follow-up letter for listings that sell especially well.

The Facebook piece has a specific workaround built in. Fair housing rules mean an agent can't just target a single street with an ad — it legally has to reach a much wider radius than that.

"You can upload those names, emails, and phone numbers as a customer list into Facebook, and then you can retarget that list specifically," Brian said. "Of course, you need to follow fair housing guidelines."

The hand-addressed letters are deliberately personal rather than a form postcard — the seller's actual name, a plain first line about who hired Foraker to sell their home, and the real number of offers the marketing generated, not a pitch about price.

Every listing also gets a video walkthrough, not just photos.

"A flyer's cool, but a flyer is going to tell you pretty much everything you could find on the internet anyway," Kate said. "I need to know if there's a pantry, how big the rooms are, is there a linen closet — that type of stuff."

Anyone who wants to watch it has to leave a name, email, and phone number first — the same information a paper flyer would have given away for free.

Delaware has a rule most agents don't take advantage of.

"In Delaware you can't put those little for-sale signs out — there's a rule that it's from five o'clock Friday to five o'clock Sunday you can have open house signs anywhere. I can't put them in your yard, but I can put them on any intersection," Brian said. "I'd do four open houses in a weekend, and I'm putting seven signs out for each one."

By the time a Mega Open House weekend actually happens, picture what the seller has seen from their side of it. Brian ran through it as if he were the seller hearing it back:

"You've hit my neighborhood twice with voicemails, you've texted everyone in your database, you've emailed everyone in your database, we're running ads online, we've hosted a mega open house, we've got Facebook events, every community post page has it — and we have the video walkthrough."

When a home sells well above its online estimate, that becomes its own piece of marketing. Foraker prints the home's old online value estimate, then mails it back to the same neighborhood with the real sale price next to it.

"Print out that estimate before you list the house — it says the estimate is 380 — and you ask: would you sell your house if you could get 10 or 20 percent more than this?" Kate said.