Selling a house is stressful.   I don’t think that anyone will deny that, if they’ve been through it.  No matter how great your listing agent is, and how perfectly your house is staged, and how low you’re priced…if you won’t let buyers in to see it, they can’t and won’t buy it.

Charlotte North Carolina’s real estate market is healthier than most.  We currently have about 5.5 months’ inventory available, market-wide (statistics courtesy of Carolina Multiple Listing Services).  Any numbers geek will tell you that this inventory level indicates a balanced market.  But let’s break it down into a number that means something to you.  As of today, 5 May 2008, there are 21606 active listings in our MLS.  Which means that if you’re selling a home in Charlotte NC, you have competition.

It also means that when you get a call from Centralized Showing Service (can I tell you how delightful it is, to have an MLS-wide appointment desk?   Woo hoo!), you need to allow that showing.  If you say NO to the showing, there is no guarantee that the buyer will come back.  When they have a ton of other choices available, it’s just not likely.  Now I know that each house is unique (I will not get on my soapbox about Vinyl Villages in this post), and that each seller feels they have the ONLY perfect house on the market.  But the fact of the matter is that when you have competition who are also well marketed, staged, and priced aggressively, you will lose out if the buyer can’t get in the door.

As an agent who works both sellers and buyers in Charlotte NC and surrounding areas (not on the same house, though, see my post about how much I don’t like dual agency if you’re curious), I can tell you that one of the most annoying phone calls to get back from the appointment desk is the classic: 

       “The seller has rescheduled your appointment from ….. to ….”

Ahem.  You don’t know my schedule, you don’t know my buyers, you don’t know anything about our planned day.  So why in the world are you so insistent that we change our tour to fit your schedule?  If buyers were plentiful and listings were scarce, it would be a different discussion.  But when I’m out showing property to buyers who must make a decision that very day, we don’t have the luxury of changing our viewing times for each house-otherwise, we won’t be able to see everything.

Case in point-I was showing property last week in the luxury home community of Highgate, in Weddington NC just over the Union County line (this is about 30 minutes’ south of uptown/downtown Charlotte NC).  My buyers were in town at the last minute, because their home in another state had sold and they were in panic mode, needing to locate the next house to complete one move.  I gave a day’s notice on showings-which is a lot of notice in this area.  One of the listings wanted to ‘reschedule’ my showing for later in the day.  The trouble was that we would have been done in Highgate by that time, and moved on to another community in the area.  So we had to cancel and could not view that home.

Within a short time frame, the listing agent had called to apologize for the seller, and was begging for us to come view it in our original showing window.  The seller panicked when the realization hit that we might not be able to adjust for their schedule.  We were already a distance away from the community at this point, and my buyer clients had already located three strong options, so they decided it wasn’t worth the aggravation to go back (yes, my buyers chose not to go back when offered that option).

What I’m trying to explain is that if you, Mr/Ms Seller, are not 100% on board and cooperative with buyer agents and showing agents, it’s hard for your house to sell. I know it’s a pain to keep that house clean, to get up and go cruise the area at the drop of a hat, to keep the kids from tearing the house up.  But if you truly want to sell-you have to adjust to the market.  Realize that your competition is also stressed out about showings, but they’re accomodating them.   Buyers are looking for motivation right now, and when you don’t want to cooperate for showings, it tells them that you are not motivated and not serious about selling.

Truly, I WANT to sell your house.  But you have to work with me on it.