Mistakes a Seller Made

There are plenty of mistakes that sellers make when trying to sell their homes. They may have too much clutter, or aren’t aware that their house smells, so they fail to use air fresheners or air out the house.  The one mistake that I encountered while being the buyer myself, time and time again, was not allowing the house to be shown.

 It sounds so counterintuitive, and isn’t uncommon to have a hard time showing, when dealing with tenants, but even some owners limit the showings so much, that the property just can’t be looked at.  When my husband and I were looking, we tried to schedule showings for Saturdays or Sundays.  We both worked full time and had two teenage boys, so evening showings were out of the question. 

 So what I would do was to put together a list of potentials during the week, sit down talk them over with my husband, and after discussing each one, we would look at each location and we would eliminate quite a few that weren’t exactly where we wanted to be, or didn’t really like something else about it.    One week, I narrowed the list down to four and Friday afternoon, started calling to make appointments and/or get the showing instructions for Saturday or Sunday. 

 It turned out that we were not able to look two out of four listings. One of them the sellers needed a week notice and the other only allowed showings in the morning and we had stuff we had to do with the kids in the morning so we didn’t see those two.  The next week, we had two listings, one was vacant, and the other one did not allow showings on the weekend.  I was really surprised to hear that, and a bit disappointed.  I understood that it was not the agents fault, I am sure the sellers were advised to allow showings on the weekend, but they chose not to.  We ended up making an offer on the vacant one and bought it.   

I never did keep track of how long it took the sellers to finally sell that property, or if they ever did sell it. Maybe they figured out that they needed to be a little more flexible.