Real estate agents face a lot of challenges.
Between prospecting, marketing and keeping in touch with past clients, it’s as if you’re balancing multiple jobs — and that’s before taking into account the time needed to schedule, manage and take clients to showings.
Although prospecting is difficult and creating (and maintaining) your personal brand can be exhausting, showings also come with a host of challenges.
What property does your client want to see? What time is it available? And, of course, why hasn’t the listing agent responded to you yet?
Scheduling showing appointments and taking clients to view multiple homes certainly comes with its frustrations.
And while some issues you face when dealing with other real estate agents can’t be fixed — time management, forgetfulness, etc. — there is a way to make the overall showing process more manageable.
How?
With ShowingTime’s help, here’s how our subscribers have overcome five of the biggest challenges of real estate showings faced by real estate agents during the showing process — and how you can too.
1. Scheduling Showings
Online scheduling, which more than 200 MLSs and/or real estate associations have through ShowingTime for the MLS, has become a go-to option throughout the industry.
However, many agents still prefer scheduling showings over the phone, by calling the listing agent directly.
There can be frustration for both agents – the one requesting the showing (waits … and waits … for a response) and the one receiving the request (has to call the seller, then call the buyer’s agent back and hopes both can be reached with one call, or else everything is delayed).
It’s not fun. Quite frankly, dealing with voicemail and waiting on confirmations can get annoying and everyone from more important tasks.
Thankfully there are other options.
Listing agents and offices can subscribe to the ShowingTime Appointment Center, which features live appointment specialists available 24/7/365 to manage showing request calls on their listings.
ShowingTime Appointment Center Plus is another time-saving solution for offices and buyer’s agents; it acts as your personal assistant to set up showings for you. Simply call one number, give the MLS ID or address of the properties you’d like to show, and get confirmations quickly.
Both solutions are that simple.
2. Lack of Communication
Remember the phone tag scenario from the previous section?
That doesn’t have to be the case.
Agents who utilize the ShowingTime mobile app can easily communicate with other agents — and sellers — within the app, confirming, declining or rescheduling appointments.
(Coming soon: enhanced agent-to-agent messaging allowing you to communicate with agents before scheduling a showing.)
And, while you can choose to receive emails, too, the benefit of using the mobile app is that push notifications, badges and alerts won’t get lost in other agents’ cluttered inboxes.
3. Planning Multiple Showings
Plotting out a day’s worth of showings for your clients can create headaches for buyer’s agents.
There’s so much to consider and map out, from showing appointment times to mapping the smartest route to driving by local points of interest.
With ShowingCart®, that process is much simpler.
ShowingCart is embedded into ShowingTime’s online scheduling platform and allows agents to quickly and easily create Buyer’s Tours and arrange your stops in a variety of ways, making a long, tedious task fast and painless.
4. Receiving Little-to-No Feedback
Getting agents to fill out feedback requests is one of the biggest challenges real estate agents face, despite everyone knowing its importance.
The fact of the matter is that unless buyer’s agents get a reminder, it can be difficult for them to not only remember to submit feedback, but also tough to differentiate listings after a long day of showings.
Fortunately, all ShowingTime subscribers send and receive automated feedback requests, which has led to feedback response rates of close to 80 percent in some markets.
Plus, not only is feedback automatically requested, but agents can customize their questions on branded forms that include a photo of the listing, the company logo and their headshot.
5. Tracking Activity
Agents with several listings know how difficult it can be to keep track of all the showing requests, showings and feedback. It’s like being a bookkeeper, in addition to everything else you have going on.
All ShowingTime products and services come with automated reports to help you keep track of everything happening with your listings. Our most popular is the Listing Activity Report, which allows you to review all activity for the life of the listing including advertisements, showings, inspections and more. Plus, it can be easily shared with your sellers.
Are you ready to unburden yourself with these five challenges — and others — that come with showings? Contact us today to learn more about how ShowingTime products and services can help you work smarter and grow your business.
