Showing and Feedback Process (Video)

Showing and Feedback Process (Video Transcription)

Hi, my name is George Belleville. I’m an agent with the Head for Home team and I’m creating this video because I wanted to provide some more information about the showing process and feedback process when we have a house listed for sale. So if you’re seeing this, we either emailed it to you because you’re a client and I wanted to just provide a little bit more detail. I know we go over a lot at the appointment and sometimes some things are lost and I wanted to make sure you understand that. And you may also be seeing this if you’re a newer agent that we’re helping train and giving information about that. So that said, the way the showing process works is when we put a property in the MLS as a listing, there’s a link there to click to schedule an appointment. And there are a few different things that go along with that that I won’t get into. But one of the things is the time required before the appointment. So if you’re living in the house, obviously you need to have notification when someone is coming to see the house. We usually do two or 3 hours. That should be enough time. So what that means is if it’s noon and somebody wants to see your house and you have a two-hour window, then that means they wouldn’t actually be able to come and see the house until 02:00 so that gives you time to repair and do whatever it is that you think you need to do to get the house ready to show. Great. If you’re not living in the house, what we normally do is we let them go immediately. So there’s really no reason to have a lag time there. So sometimes agents at the last minute will get a request and it is helpful for them to be able to show the house quickly. So if you are living in the house, and we do have that timing set up, it’s perfectly fine to be home when the agent arrives to show the house. You don’t have to vacate the house during the entire period of that scheduled appointment. What you can do is just wait till they get there and either go for a walk, go outside, excuse yourself, leave, come back. It’s even okay if you want to give the agent your cell phones and they can text you when they’re done. There’s nothing wrong with that. So that way you don’t have to be out of the house during that entire window. Because sometimes agents run late, they might get there at the very last minute. So that’s okay if you want to do that. You don’t need to be completely out of the house.

The other thing I want to talk about is feedback. So we have a very specific feedback form that I created because it asks questions that I want the answer to about the buyer who’s looking at the home. And it’s a little too much detail. I don’t need to go into it in the video, but it asks specific questions such as where are they in the buying process and if they’re ready to buy right now, if they’re just starting out. Because obviously, if we’re talking about feedback, we want the feedback from the buyers who’ve been out looking at other houses because their feedback is probably in relation to other houses. So we make several requests for feedback. We send it to the agent three times and depending on the market, we may or may not get maybe 50% of the agents will actually send us feedback. So that’s pretty good. One thing to think about is also sometimes it’s actually feedback from the buyer based on discussions that the agent had with the buyer at the house or afterwards. Sometimes it’s feedback from the agent and sometimes we just don’t know. And you can usually tell by the way it’s worded whether it’s coming from the buyer or from the agent. But that’s something to keep in mind. It’s not always necessarily the buyer’s opinion that we’re hearing back. So it can be a little bit confusing. But there are a couple of things I want to talk about with feedback.

So first of all, part of I see my job as a listing agent is to go through the house and identify anything that could generate feedback. So if there is some very old-fashioned wallpaper, this happens fairly frequently. There’s some fairly old-fashioned wallpaper in a dining room, let’s say. And I know that’s something that is not popular with buyers, I’m going to tell you that at the listing appointment. And my theory is you really shouldn’t be getting negative feedback from a showing that I haven’t already told you about. I feel like that would be me not doing my job. It shouldn’t be a surprise. I know what buyers like and we’ll talk about that whether you want to address it or not. That’s a whole nother conversation. I’m actually going to do a video about that. But that feedback, you really shouldn’t be getting surprised by it. And one thing a wise man told me is that all feedback is actually about price. So if someone says, let’s just say, for example, that your yard is too small, what that means is your yard is too small at that price. And this person even told me, just put dot, dot, dot at that price after any negative feedback, because there’s a price at which they won’t care about that anymore. And if you’re competing with other properties, say there’s another house in your neighborhood that’s just like yours, but they have a bigger yard and you’re the same price, then your house, you’re going to get that feedback and it’s going to be at that price. So that’s something important to think about.

But the real important feedback is an offer. That’s the feedback that really matters. Because if people are just emailing us their opinions and telling us things, like I said, if it’s something we’ve already talked about you already know about, an example is maybe a backyard that is very steep and wouldn’t be great for activities in the backyard. We know that’s an issue. If you get feedback about that, there’s nothing you can do about it. So we try not to lose any sleep over it. Right. That’s a pricing issue and that’s one of the things you kind of have to steel yourself to hearing things about your house that you might not like, but it’s just kind of part of the process.

So I wanted to go over those things just to make sure we’re on the same page with them and that you understand why we’re doing the things we do. Like I said, when we meet for our listing appointment, it’s a lot of information and some of it kind of gets lost because it’s too much. So I wanted to come back and talk about the scheduling process and the feedback process. So if you have any questions, give us a call. Have a great day. Bye.