Showing Feedback: A Seller’s Perspective
I personally don’t pursue feedback from showings and I’m upfront about this with sellers. I explain that my feelings on this topic come from working with buyers and being hounded asked for feedback from listing agents.
As a buyer's agent, I feel that 99% of the time there’s nothing I can tell the listing agent that he doesn’t (or shouldn’t) already know or couldn't figure out on his own with just a little effort. The 1% of the time when I feel there IS something the agent should know (such as, the key to the house isn’t in the lockbox) then I'll call the agent before that person has a chance to call me.
Of course, I understand the other side of the story. Sellers like getting feedback, right? They like to know what the potential buyer thought of their home and why that person hasn’t yet put in an offer… RIGHT?
Recently I had an interesting conversation with a seller. This person is a family friend and listed his home with another agent, the agent who represented him in the purchase of his home. (Nope, no bad feelings on my part. I understand and respect that decision, and I have no doubt his agent will do a great job for him.)
Now, I certainly didn’t start this conversation. But the seller offered up his concerns on getting his home sold and mentioned that they’d gotten a good number of showings… and a good amount of useless feedback, too. The feedback was stuff like “the yard is too big.” Well, that's not something anyone can do anything about. Or “the buyers want a finished basement.” In this case, the buyer's agent should have seen from the listing that the basement is not finished and the home should not have been shown.
I didn’t comment other than to say “I’m sure the right buyer will come along soon.” But I have to admit, I rather liked hearing directly from a seller how in his view the feedback is useless. My thoughts exactly.
What I tell sellers is that the feedback we’re looking for is an offer to purchase the home. If we haven’t gotten one in a reasonable amount of time, I’ll bring out my “Why isn’t this home selling?” checklist and will actively seek out the problem along with a solution (if it exists) for the seller. In my opinion, it's not the buyer's agent's responsibility to give the seller feedback. This duty belongs to the listing agent.
P.S. One of the items on my checklist mentioned above is to get unbiased feedback, and, if necessary, I do this by asking a friend or fellow real estate agent to view the home with me (I'll treat that person to lunch for the favor). To me, this is a far more effective and far less intrusive way to get real feedback than interrupting buyers' agents with phone calls. It also happens to be a lot more fun :-)
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