Flight plan template for Real estate

The flight plan with three columns a property campaign needs: which listing or development the week is selling, which stage of the sale it sits in, and which inspections or events fall inside it.

Everything else is the general flight plan, unchanged. One row per week of one line of spend, a phase on every row, a share of the flight on each, and a decision point at the end of every phase.

Use it for any campaign running to a fixed date — an auction, the close of expressions of interest, a launch weekend. The weight has to be built towards that date rather than spread across the period, and a weekly plan is the only place that shape can be written down.

Write it when the listing is signed and the method of sale is set, and read it after every open inspection, because attendance is the number the next week's weight should follow.

A property campaign runs to a date that cannot move, and the weeks nearest that date do most of the work. That single fact should be visible in the share column: the weight builds, and the last stretch carries more of the flight than any other.

A plan that spreads the budget evenly across the period is not neutral, it is wrong in a particular direction. It spends most heavily when the smallest number of buyers are paying attention, and it arrives at the auction or the close of expressions with the audience already saturated and nothing held back.

Writing the weeks out, from the fixed date backwards, is what makes the intended shape arguable before it is spent. It also exposes the case nobody wants to find late: a campaign whose start date is pushed by photography and which therefore has fewer weeks than the shape needs.

The stage column changes the creative and the call to action, not just the weight.

Pre-launch has no address to send anyone to and is building an audience. The launch weekend is the concentration, and the thing being asked for is attendance. Open inspections are a rhythm, where the ad's job is to fill a specific time on a specific day. Pre-auction is the last push at people who have already engaged, asking for registration rather than interest. Post-auction, where it happens, is a different campaign with a different message and it belongs in its own phase.

Putting the stage on every row means a week never quietly runs the wrong request. The most common version of that mistake is a pre-auction week still running launch creative, asking a warm audience to discover a property they have already inspected.

The inspections column lists the open homes, private appointments and events falling inside the week, with their dates.

It is there because the campaign is not buying attention in general, it is buying attendance at specific times. A week with two inspections is a different week from one with none, and the weight, the creative and the placement should all reflect that. Writing the dates into the row also makes the Monday review concrete: the question is not whether the week performed, it is whether Saturday filled.

Where an inspection is cancelled or moved — weather, a vendor's change of mind — that is a change to the plan and to the week's purpose, and it belongs in the notes rather than only in a calendar.

The most useful reading in a property flight is what happened at the last inspection, and it separates two problems that look identical in a platform's reporting.

A quiet inspection after a week of strong reach and strong click-through is usually a price or a property problem: people saw it, considered it and did not come. A quiet inspection after a week of thin reach is a reach problem, and the answer is a wider corridor or more weight rather than new creative.

Write the decision point for each week in those terms. It costs one sentence, and it is the difference between changing the right thing and changing the visible thing.

Every property campaign depends on assets that arrive on a date somebody else controls: the shoot, the copy, the floorplan, the portal listing going live.

Put each in the dependency column with its due date, and never set a flight start before them. A first week run on a floorplan is a week of a fixed period spent without the asset that does most of the persuading, and a fixed period has no spare weeks to give back.

Where the schedule genuinely cannot be met, the honest responses are to move the fixed date if it can move, or to shorten the campaign and say so in the plan. Starting late and hoping the last week compensates is the most common way a property flight underspends its own budget.

The listing column and the campaign naming together make the flight reportable. Property spend is usually vendor-funded in whole or in part, and the question that follows is what was spent on this property, in which weeks, and what it produced.

Record the vendor-paid portion once, at the top of the flight, and keep the listing reference in every row and every campaign name. The report then assembles itself from the plan rather than being rebuilt by hand after the auction, which is when nobody has time for it.

A listing flight is paid for to sell one property, and it is also seen by every owner in the corridor who is watching what sells and who sold it. That second audience is valuable and it is not what the vendor is funding.

Keep the agency's own market-presence spend in its own flight, with its own weeks, its own weight and its own metric — usually appraisal requests rather than enquiries. Blended into the listing rows it will flatter them, and the listing will be credited with interest it never created.

The practical test is the report. If a week's spend cannot be explained to the person paying for it in one sentence, it belongs in a different flight.

Every week between the start and the fixed date has a row. Every row names a listing reference and a stage of sale. Every row lists the inspections falling inside it. The weight builds towards the fixed date rather than spreading across the period. Every dependency, photography included, has a due date before the week that needs it. Every phase carries a decision point written as a question. And the vendor-paid portion is recorded before anybody asks for it.