I have been so fortunate recently to be working with quite a few buyer clients in St. Charles, Geneva and Batavia, IL. I've had a couple of transferees, a few existing clients, some sellers thinking about price reductions -- a great mix and a lot of work but buyers are important to my business. I just realized that I have shown every weekend day for the last five weekends -- dozens and dozens of showings. My family room table has at least 10 stacks of listing sheets and my children are getting tired of the Panera-Subway-Papa Johns feeding rotation, which I thought could never happen.
I've learned some new things and been reminded of so many basics that I want to share some "lessons learned". Maybe some listing agent (or her seller) will benefit from my last few weeks of experiences.
1) There are so many homes listed for sale -- we all know that. For a transferee or even someone moving from 30 miles away, the number and variety of choices is just overwhelming. Financing is more difficult than ever. Most buyers want to take a least one trip down short sale and foreclosure lane. Doing a thorough job for our buyers is more complex, takes longer and yet suddenly puts the Realtor right back in he thick of things.
2) Sellers do not need to be doormats, but they really do need to realize that if I say "I'll be in your subdivision between 11:00 and 1:00 on Saturday", I can't come back after 4:30 because I will probably be 20 miles away by then. I am generally courteous and flexible, and will work around a kid's birthday party if I have to, but on a busy day I am coordinating showings with probably 20 other sellers and their schedules.
3) It makes me uncomfortable to speak directly to sellers. Sorry, I just don't like it. This puts me in the awkward position of negotiating ahead of time with the seller about access to the home and the inevitable chat about what my buyer client is looking for. Sometimes it is hard not to snap "a newer 4 bedroom house with 3 bathrooms and a finished basement in a nice neighborhood". Why else would I be showing the home -- it must meet at least some criteria or we wouldn't be trying to see it! In my opinion, showings should be scheduled through a service, the agent's staff, or the agent himself.
4) Listing agents should have smart phones or pagers or some way to be reached in a difficulty. A couple of weekends ago a house was wide open when I got there. The agent's office was closed and he didn't answer his cell number or respond to a text. I even went and knocked on a neighbor's door but no one was home. It was the end of the day and I was so uncomfortable leaving a house unlocked.
5) A listing agent should be available for questions before showing during normal real estate business hours, which includes nights (to a reasonable hour) and weekends. "Call me after you've seen the home" is about as uncooperative as I can imagine. For one recent transferee, my assistant and I called ahead on about 50 listings with a list of qualifying questions for info not in the mls:
-- no range tops in the island (little kids)
-- a house without smokers or pets (allergic little kids)
-- not on a busy street (subjective but quiet is better for little kids)
-- location of the bathrooms, need 3 full baths on 2nd floor and want a jack and jill (lots of little kids)
-- finished basement with a playroom, bedroom and full bath (Mrs. Buyer will feel better about move if her sister's family can visit often)
-- a flat lot for ball games, no ponds, ravines or direct access to a bike path (what can I say, they're from a state even flatter than Illinois and they want a perfectly level property)
Guess which houses got shown? The ones that I was SURE met their criteria. Mrs. Buyer, a transferee I'd never met, had less than 48 hours to see houses. No way was I going to show her houses that didn't work for her, it would have been disrespectful and a waste of her time.
6) A listing agent should respond to other agent's questions and criteria and be honest. One GREAT agent I met last weekend said "you know what, my listing on Elm Street is nice but doesn't work because it adjoins the bike path. But I have a pocket listing that sounds perfect. I can meet you at it whenever you want". She met us between her kid's soccer games to let us into the house (since it wasn't listed yet there was no lockbox), sent her blackberry photos to us while we were there (no photos or brochure yet), and gave us the subdivision's newsletter so we would have "something to walk away with". I am fortunate that we work for the same brokerage (different offices so we don't really know each other) and her GREATNESS reflected back on me. The client, an executive with a big company, even commented that he was impressed. A GREAT listing agent also makes other agents look GREAT. This agent's house isn't the final choice, but you can bet I will show this home again AND I would be delighted to work with her on a transaction. In a very competitive market, this is a great benefit for her sellers.
7) Professional listing agents don't argue with other agents. If my client tells me to say in feedback that the house has an unusual (funky) layout or there are too many steps from the deck to the yard, I'm not going to debate it. Calling me to ask why we thought the house was overpriced is OK, but arguing with me is not. The issue of auto-publishing feedback has also come to haunt me -- an agent was livid with me a few months ago over this. I wrote in the feedback comment box for a short sale something like -- the house showed poorly and at this price, it looks like your client is going to end up being foreclosed on. The client was really upset that I used the word foreclosure but how was I to know that the agent didn't look at feedback before sending it on to the client? As a listing agent, I always look at feedback first and do not auto-publish to the seller. I want to use feedback as a conversation between agents, not between me as the buyer's agent and the seller.
8) Brochures with good photos and a lot of them are necessary, even in the age of the all pervasive internet. All my "Mr. and Mrs. Buyers" like them. I give buyers a free download of Smarter Agent so they can see photos right on their i-phones or blackberries, everyone has wireless laptops, and yet they still want to clutch a stack of brochures at the end of the day. I was curious when one Mr. Buyer kept coming back to a glossy, expensive brochure during our wrap up at the end of the day. I asked what he thought of the brochure and if he thought it was worth the expense. He said, and I quote, "I think if I wanted to sell this house to my wife this brochure sure would help". Very interesting comment.
9) Staging and nice landscaping make a good house look really good. There is so much information about this, how can this be lost on a seller in a competitive market? And staging doesn't need to mean an elaborate redecorating with an expensive consultant and rented furniture. Cleaning, decluttering, boxing up junk, weeding, cleaning the cat box, turning on lights -- these should be so simple to achieve. A clean and orderly home looks like a well-maintained home and is a positive reflection on the owner. Oh my gosh, I sound like my grandmother but she was right.
10) Feedback is necessary and valuable to sellers. I love on-line feedback and will happily write specific feedback in comment boxes. But for goodness sakes, I need to know which house the feedback is for. No front picture in the request is inexcusable -- enough said. But I am much more likely to give useful feedback if the form has a photo AND a descriptive line like "this all brick home has large fenced yard with a huge playset, a recently remodeled kitchen with the cherry cabinets and a Wolf range, and a large mudroom with cute cubbies". And finally, regarding feedback, if I've replied on-line I don't think I am also obligated to return the feedback call from an agent's assistant. The Monday morning feedback fiestas are just too overwhelming to me!
There is nothing in this that is all that new or interesting...but maybe lots of agents got out of practice when things were slower and need some gentle nudges to smarten up for today's market...I know that I keep learning and my sellers will certainly benefit from this surge of buyer activity.
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