Most sellers treat marketing as something that starts on listing day. Photos get taken, the MLS listing goes live, a sign goes up, and the campaign begins.

Here's the problem with that timeline: by the time your home can legally be marketed to the public, it's too late to prepare anything. The window is too short, and the standard is too high.

Let us explain.

The rules, and what they actually mean for your timeline

Under CREA's Cooperation Policy, once a home is publicly marketed in any way, it must be on MLS within three days. That's not a One Oak policy. It's the national rule, and it exists to keep the market fair.

Three days. That's the entire Coming Soon window.

Now think about what has to be true on day one of that window. Every Coming Soon campaign we run on comingsoonpg.com uses the complete marketing package — professional photography, video, the iGUIDE tour, ad creative, the works. Which means your home can't be "almost ready" when the Coming Soon window opens. It has to be fully show-ready and photo-ready before a single piece of public marketing goes out. The repairs done. The staging finished. The media shot, edited, and loaded.

There's no catching up inside a 3-day window. Whatever exists on day one is the campaign.

So when does the marketing actually start?

Weeks earlier — just not publicly. Here's the real sequence behind a well-run launch:

4–6 weeks out: strategy. Pricing built on your micro-market, not the city average. In a city where quadrant medians can sit $200,000 apart, this step alone changes outcomes.  This is also when we map buyer demand — who's actively searching in your neighbourhood and price range — so the campaign targets real buyers, not a hypothetical audience.

3–4 weeks out: preparation with a deadline. Repairs, paint, decluttering, staging decisions. Everything the camera will see, finished before the camera arrives.

1–2 weeks out: media production on the finished home. Photography, video, and the iGUIDE tour are shot once — on a home that looks its best. These assets carry the entire campaign, from the Coming Soon posts through the full MLS run. There are no second chances on first-impression media.

Launch: everything fires at once. The Coming Soon window opens with the full package live on comingsoonpg.com, targeted ads running, and matched buyers notified. Three days of anticipation, then a strong MLS debut — and the momentum carries straight into the first days of a listing, which carry disproportionate weight.

The mistake: confusing "not ready to list" with "not ready to plan"

Sellers often delay calling an agent because the house isn't ready — there's painting to do, a season to wait for, a decision still half-made. But that's exactly backwards. The agent conversation isn't the listing. It's the planning that makes the house ready on schedule.

The sellers who call us six weeks out get a coordinated launch: prep finished, media shot on a show-ready home, campaign loaded, buyers matched. The ones who call on a Tuesday wanting to market by Friday face a hard truth — a 3-day Coming Soon window with rushed photos of a half-prepared home isn't a launch. It's a missed opportunity with a countdown clock.

The One Oak approach

Our Coming Soon system is built around the constraint, not against it. Because the public window is short, we compress every ounce of preparation into the weeks before it opens — so that when your home appears on comingsoonpg.com, it appears finished, photographed properly, and in front of the buyers most likely to want it.

For buyers wondering how to see these homes during that window, that's exactly what our buyer-side system is built for. 

What to do next

If selling is anywhere on your radar this year — even if the house isn't ready, even if you're unsure on timing — start the planning conversation now. Getting the home ready is the project. The 3-day window is just the reveal. It costs nothing to plan, it commits you to nothing, and it's the difference between a launch and a scramble.