How your Showing Instructions can affect the showings on your Buffalo area home for sale!

You are considering listing your Western New York home for sale. You are interviewing agents and trying to decide which one is the best to represent your home sale. You are weighing a lot of factors like commission, advertising and staging. I want to talk about a couple of very important aspects of selling your WNY home.

Accessibility of your home for sale

This is what we call showing instructions. These instructions are the kiss of death for some listings. Why you ask? Well that is an excellent question. Here are a couple of examples of what can happen:

• A young couple drops by an Open House an agent is hosting, based on their criteria they know your home is the right one for them, after a quick check with a pre-qualification, the Realtor attempts to book a last minute appointment for your home
• Many times a Realtor decides what to show a client based on their criteria, yet in the second home they show the criteria changes. That is when a good Realtor adjusts course and tries to show homes within the new criteria. Many times needing to make appointments short notice.
• A client gets a MLS listing automatically from the agent, and absolutely has to see it.
• You are driving to an appointment and the client yells “STOP the car — that is my dream house”. A quick check, sign in the yard, not on MLS, call to find out information and try and get in.
• Client surfing the Internet finds your listing, calls their agent and wants to see it ASAP.
• Your listing just came up on the MLS in the morning before the agent goes out with their clients, and they want to add your home to their list.

Making your home appealing to Buyer’s Agents to show is the most important thing because many times that is the reality of showings, they are last minute.

You will want to:

• Place an electronic lock box on your home for sale
• Allow last minute showings – what do I mean, set a time frame that it is ok to just send agents with a call to you. For example: Monday-Friday 10a-5pm, Saturday, Sunday & Holidays 11am-4pm. Other times confirmed appointment only.

You will want to avoid:

• Confirmed only appointments – hassle, agent wants to show homes, not be a on the phone hoping to get appointments
• Accompanied showings – Unless you have a home listed over $500,000, have extraordinary collection of rare art, or are a celebrity not a good idea.
• 24, 48 hour notice
• Tenants in the unit for sale — red flag for a problematic showing

Making of Appointments

This is a sore spot with many agents. I know that I check the MLS for homes for sale, check the showing instruction for restrictions, then I call the number that is listed to make appointments. If it says 24 hours notice and it is 9am and I am showing at 3pm, the home is eliminated.

Here are some obstacles that I have encountered when scheduling appointments:

• Schedule an appointment, get confirmation, show up to the home and:
  • The owner refuses to let us in because they did not get a call regarding the showing
  • There is nobody to meet us at the scheduled time
  • No key in the lockbox
• Get Agent Voicemail, no return call. Call Office after two hours, immediately sent to agent voicemail because the agent can only schedule the appointment
• Agent Phone number disconnected – oh and it is a one-man brokerage, it is also the broker’s number!
• Get “Oh that home has been under contract for weeks” Obviously this agent has not a clue about changing the property status in the MLS
• Call to schedule an appointment and the agent tells me “I can’t reach the homeowners, haven’t been able to for weeks” Don’t you think it is time to put a note in the MLS?
• Told “that time doesn’t work for me” for a Saturday appointment “just bring them to the Open House on Sunday”. Meanwhile my out of town clients will be landing in NJ by the time the Open House begins.
• Gotta love this one “The owners are on vacation for two weeks, I don’t have keys so it will have to wait until they return” Might want to share that in the listing?
• No showing instruction in the MLS and call the office to make an appointment. Get Voicemail Saturday Morning when trying to schedule an appointment for Monday afternoon. Leave message. No return call Sunday morning, leave another message. Agent calls me on Monday Morning yelling at me that she needs at least 48 business hour notice for a showing. Think that might be helpful in the showing instructions?
• Another example that it should be in the showing instructions, after leaving a message that I wanted to show a certain property the next day at 11am, the agent called me while I was on the phone, left me a message to call them regarding showings, I called back, phone tag, four hours later the agent calls me back to tell me “The wife is on bed rest the next two months, showings can only be between 6-8pm” Gee, thanks, think you could have left that in the first message?

If these are happening to me, can you imagine what is happening to Realtors all over Western New York? Showing instructions are key to ensure that you get the maximum exposure on your WNY home for sale.

Before you decide to list with a particular Real Estate Professional:

• Test their scheduling of showings. Because that could be a roadblock in getting your home sold!
• Make sure you see the MLS copy that other Realtors see
• Know if they are not available, that they have a system in place for ensuring that service happens to both the Real Estate Professionals and potential buyers.

Ready to list your home? Want to speak with me about doing that? Call me at (716)650-0051, if you get my voicemail, that just means I am currently either showing a home to potential buyers, working with one of my many investor clients or meeting with home sellers about selling their home.

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Tags: Buffalo Homes For Sale, Home Sales, real estate, Realtor, sell real estate, showing instructions
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