"We'll do some Coming Soon marketing for you."
Sellers hear this a lot, and it usually means one of two things. Either the agent has a genuine pre-market system with deadlines, deliverables, and a campaign built before the listing goes live — or they mean they will post a photo of your front door on Instagram the night before.
Those are very different things, and the gap between them shows up in your first ten days on market.
Here is what a real pre-market plan involves, what the rules in Canada actually permit, and how to tell whether the agent sitting across from you has a system or a slogan.
First, the rule that shapes everything
Under the Canadian Real Estate Association's Cooperation Policy, a listing can be publicly marketed for a maximum of three days before it must be entered on MLS. That window is not optional and it is not negotiable.
This matters because it changes what "Coming Soon" actually means. It is not a strategy for keeping a home off the market for weeks while a handful of buyers get a private look. It is a short, deliberate, three-day attention window that runs immediately before the home goes live on MLS.
Which means the entire value of a pre-market plan depends on one thing: whether the work was done beforehand.
Three days is not enough time to prepare a home, book a photographer, produce video, write copy, and build a campaign. If those things are not finished before the window opens, the window is wasted. Most of the disappointment sellers feel about Coming Soon marketing comes from exactly this — the concept was applied without the preparation behind it.
The sequence that makes it work
A pre-market plan that produces results follows the same order every time.
Weeks out: strategy and pricing. Price, target buyer, launch date, and neighbourhood positioning get decided early — not the week before. In a city where the Q1 2026 median single-family price ran $418,250 east of the bypass and $611,450 in the Hart [Colin: confirm], the buyer you are targeting changes completely depending on where the home sits and what band it lands in. That decision drives everything downstream.
Preparation with a hard deadline. Decluttering, repairs, paint, landscaping, staging decisions. This phase has a firm end date, because everything after it depends on the home being finished. A deadline that slips does not delay one task — it collapses the whole sequence.
Media production on a finished home. Professional photography, iGUIDE tour with accurate measurements and floor plan, video, and social content are produced only once the home is genuinely show-ready. Photographing a home that is 80% ready produces marketing that is 80% ready, and buyers notice the other 20% in the first three photos.
The three-day window opens with the full asset package already built. Video, photos, floor plan, copy, ad creative, and the campaign are complete before the first post goes out. The window is for attention, not production.
MLS entry, with demand already built. By the time the listing is live, buyers who have been watching have already seen the home, saved it, and in some cases booked a showing for day one.
That order is the whole thing. Get it wrong and Coming Soon becomes a label rather than a strategy.
Where social media and video actually fit
Social media does not sell a home by itself. What it does is put your home in front of people who are not currently searching MLS — and in Prince George, that is a meaningful group.
Some of the strongest buyers for a home are not in an active search. They are people who would move for the right property, buyers watching a specific neighbourhood, families waiting for something in a school catchment, or people in Vancouver or Kelowna weighing a move north who have not started looking seriously yet. None of them see a new MLS listing on day one. All of them see a well-produced video in their feed.
This is also where paid campaigns matter more than organic posting. An organic post reaches whoever already follows the account. A targeted campaign puts the home in front of buyers by location, price band, and behaviour — including people who have already been looking at similar homes online. For a home in the $585,000 southwest range, that is a very different audience than a starter home east of the bypass, and it should be targeted differently.
Video does the work that photos cannot. It shows flow between rooms, ceiling height, yard size, and the feel of a space. It also travels — a strong walkthrough gets shared between family members deciding together, which is how a lot of buying decisions actually get made.
The common mistake: treating pre-market as a substitute for preparation
The mistake sellers make is thinking Coming Soon buys them time. It does the opposite.
A pre-market plan pulls every deadline forward. The home has to be finished earlier. Photography happens earlier. Decisions about price and positioning happen earlier. Sellers who expect a Coming Soon campaign to give them breathing room usually end up rushing the preparation, which produces the exact weak first impression the campaign was supposed to prevent.
The right way to think about it: Coming Soon is a launch, and launches require everything to be ready before the date, not on it.
The second mistake is assuming any attention is good attention. Three days of promotion for a home with dark photos, no floor plan, and a cluttered kitchen does not build demand. It just shows more people a home that is not ready.
How One Oak runs it
One Oak treats the pre-market period as a production schedule with dates attached, not a marketing idea.
Strategy and pricing get set weeks ahead. Preparation runs against a hard deadline. Photography, iGUIDE, and video happen only on a finished, show-ready home. The full asset package — photos, floor plan, video, copy, ad creative — is complete before the three-day window opens. Then the campaign runs across social, paid search, and the Coming Soon list, and the home hits MLS with attention already built.
The point is not that Coming Soon is magic. The point is that a home which launches fully prepared, fully documented, and already in front of the right buyers competes differently in its first ten days than a home that goes live and waits.
You can see how this has worked for recent Prince George sellers on our [Rank My Agent profile], where reviews are tied to verified transactions.
Your next step
If you are planning to sell in the next few months, the useful conversation is not about listing date. It is about working backwards from it.
Whatever your target launch is, the preparation, photography, and campaign build all need to fit ahead of it. That timeline is worth mapping out early, because the homes that launch well are the ones where nothing got compressed at the end.
[Book a listing launch strategy call] and we will work backwards from your ideal launch date to figure out what needs to happen and when.
Buyers who want early access to upcoming homes can [join the Coming Soon list] to see them as the three-day windows open.