Here’s my quick hit list:
1. Give us up-to-date, current residential real estate comps so we know how to price the condo – We know the market can change from month to month, season to season.
2. Tell us what you’re going to do to market the listing – Will you advertise it in the paper? Market it online? Who will write the brilliant prose that describes how great it would be to live in this condo?
3. Tell us how you’ll get showings, and about how many we should expect – Do you have an assistant? Will we be notified of showing requests? Will you be handling the showing inquiries yourself, or will you use an appointment center service?
4. Tell us what showing feedback you’ve received – The five siblings involved in this transaction are in five different cities, in different time zones. Do you have a way for each of us to login to a site and view the activity on the listing? The showing feedback? How many showings have occurred? Where you ran ads?
5. Give us your best guess on how long it might be on the market – What does your gut tell you as a real estate professional?
Clearly, sellers can be pretty demanding, but I think they should be. This list is probably a pretty standard list of expectations. Sellers expect agents to earn their commission by coaching on price, and giving electronic access to relevant data on the listing and the market.
It’s a tough job being a listing agent and doing it well.
As a ShowingTime employee, this gives me some interesting insight into the kinds of demands sellers place on their agent. And I came about it first-hand, as a current seller. It made me appreciate the amount of work a good listing agent has to do to please the seller, and that it requires a major commitment of time.
It also made me think that it’s worth using a service such as the ShowingTime Appointment Center to handle the time-consuming details of scheduling showings, getting feedback, providing access to reports, etc. so higher payoff tasks (how to market this listing for maximum exposure, maximum showings and maximum selling price) can receive proper attention.
Each situation is unique, each seller is unique, each listing agent is unique. But doing a great job on the five ‘quick hit list’ items mentioned above should not be unique – each should be accomplished every time.
Do you spend too much of your day scheduling and confirming showing appointments? Learn how the ShowingTime Appointment Center helps free up your time to focus on other tasks to grow your business.