To the wart-headed real estate agent who wanted to show my house last night

The BBQ Pit
1

Y’know, it’s fuckin’ rude to call at 6:15 pm and want to show the house at 6:45. Regardless, I decided to allow it, since I want to sell this house badly. So Mr. Athena and I run around, get the house cleaned up, and allow the jambalaya I’ve had cooking all afternoon turn to mush so that you can show the fuckin’ house. 6:45 rolls around… nothing. 7:00… nothing. 7:15… Mr. Athena says “let’s run to the store and buy more tabasco since we’re out.” 7:35, we come back, there is no agent’s card on the table, indicating the house has been shown. WTF? Seething, we sit down and eat the mush-that-used-to-be-jambalaya.

Next day, I get a call from MY agent. Seems the agent claims they were turned away at the door. WTF? Nobody came to MY door. The fuckin’ agent went to the WRONG HOUSE. At least, that’s the story - Mr. Athena doesn’t believe it. If you went to the WRONG HOUSE, how difficult is it to look around and see that there’s another house TWO DOORS down, and think “Boy, is THAT where we’re supposed to be?”

Fuckin’ agents.

2

Maybe he can call the pizza guy beforehand next time for directions.

3

I just finished a whole year of that.

After the first month I made a simple rule, told my agent, and stuck to it.

That rule?

24 hour notice, or don’t bother calling, the answer will be “no.”

The way I figured it, you still have to have a life, and anybody that just wants to blow by and look at your place on the spur of the moment isn’t likely to be that serious a buyer.

The goal is not showings, it’s good showings. A serious buyer will see the ads for your house, and schedule a good time in advance to see it. If somebody really likes your house, they’ll coem back. Turning down a last minute appointment doesn’t really hurt you. It gives your house a feel of exclusivity that won’t put off somebody who is truly interested.

Once I made the rule, I got called twice more on last minute stuff. When I said “no,” they both came back later, anyway, and then the agents stopped trying to walk over me using my property to kill time in between “serious” appointments.

4

I feel your pain Athena.

We just signed a contract on the house we’re in now. We had to get rid of the first real estate agent because he couldn’t get it through his head that he couldn’t just show the house whenever he damn well felt like it. That jackass couldn’t understand that the kids were in school and the wife has other obligations and oh by the way the german shepard ain’t real keen on strangers coming in the house. So we contracted with another realtor and made it quite clear up front that showings were by appointment only. Period. Not negotiable. Everything worked ok after that. I wish you the best of luck on selling your house.

5

I can see it now…the perfect buyer for Athena’s house was shown the wrong propery. A :wally to the poor excuse for a realtor!

6

My wife and I put up our house for sale a year ago starting on a Friday morning. We both work and told our agent that anyone that called could stop by. When I got home from work there were 28 realtor cards on the table! That evening we made ourselves scarce to our realtor since we knew there would be offers and that he would pressure to take one. He caught us Saturday afternoon with a full price, no condition (not even an inspection!) offer. Since we were up to over 50 walkthroughs I wanted a bidding war but he talked us into accepting if we raised the price 4% and the buyer accepted. What can you do? No conditions, 4% higher than what you wanted which was already 5% higher than previous places sold for around. I always thought we could have gotten more but I checked last month and they are selling for a bit less than what we got (it was a condo).

How hard can it be, you sellers?

…D&R…:smiley:

7

No offense Scylla, but do you really think this is the best way to sell your house, given that it took a whole year for you to do it? Traffic is indeed the best thing for your house. An “air of exclusivity” can also be interpreted as a pain in the ass seller that’s going to be difficult to work with.

This is a typical scenario for Macro Ma’am (realtor for several years):

Customer calls her office:

Customer: “I drove by and saw a sign from your company. I wanna look at 123 Oak Road”.

Macro Ma’am: "You bet. Let me set it up. And by the way, there are four other houses in the area that you might be interested in. "

Customer: “Great! I’ll meet you in 45 minutes to go see all of them!”
If your house doesn’t fit into the schedule, it is left out. Maybe she can show it later, maybe it’s too late. Either way, the main loser in this situation is you, because your house may not be shown. Sure, if it’s irresistable the customer may come back, but maybe not. Thirty minutes is short notice to get the house ready, but it can be done. People do it every day, and indeed it’s the industry standard, in my experience. Dogs go in the back room in cages, and nobody leaves the house unless it’s ready to show. Plus, you can usually set up rules with the showing service on the amount of time you need, but 24 hours is way too long, IMHO.

No shows suck, but they come with the territory. Sometimes the customer finds a house before yours. Sometimes they drive up to your home and there is something undesirable about it that eliminates it from the running without consideration (backs up to a major road, etc). Whatever the reason, the agents should call and cancel, but often do not. And we got at least one showing that was scheduled for a neighbor, and several showings that never called at all. We let them all show the house.

Regardless, selling a house is stressful and it sucks. But imagine trying to do it without an agent. It sucks tenfold.

8

We’re at the point where we want to allow ANY showing. For a while, we were saying no when it wasn’t convenient, but as of July we’ll be paying on this house and our new house, and we want to sell this one asap. It’s already been on the market for 8 bloody months, so we’re more than sick of showings. But you never know - that one showing might be the right one.

If I required a 24 hour notice, I would rarely get showings. As it is, we try for 2 hour notice, and sometimes don’t even get that. It truly sucks. People who don’t show suck, but I can at least understand running out of time, or maybe they decided they didn’t like the neighborhood, or whatever. What I don’t understand is why the FUCK the agents don’t bother calling? It’s RUDE. Spend a minute to give the person who spent a minimum of 15-20 minutes (and probably longer) to get their house in shape for a showing a call to say “My client didn’t like the neighborhood” or “We ran into a time crunch”. Don’t just fuckin’ leave it!

Same with this fuckhead last night - when you went to the wrong goddamn house, why didn’t you think “Boy, I just talked to their agent not 30 minute ago, and he said it was OK. Maybe I should call him back and find out what the mixup is.” Or maybe double check the address. Or maybe take your head out of your ass and notice that there’s another for sale sign TWO DOORS DOWN and think that MAYBE that’s the one.

9

I agree with Scylla here. You have to not take any crap from them.

When we were selling our house last year, the agent called and asked if they could send someone over. “Uh, ok. When?” “Now? Is that ok? As they are sitting outside your property at this moment.” hmph. Told them it wasn’t ok, and the people came back at a more convenient time. They purchased the house in the end, and it went through hassle free.

Our biggest concern was to sell the house a.s.a.p. Having said that, the agent was working for us. It might be a massive generalisation, but I think they forget that sometimes. If they couldn’t agree to our terms, they would’ve lost the business.

Best of luck to you though.

10

I had the same attitude as Scylla and Carodin, eight months ago. Now, if someone wakes me up at 3am and wants to do a showing, I’ll let 'em. I just need to sell this house.

11

Um, no Macro-that’s not a good idea. Because it’s still MY house, see.

What if I’m sick?

What if I’m in the bathtub?

What if I’m having sex?

My goodness, if you’re interested in a house, you’ll wait.

12

I know that having strangers coming through your house at all hours and with short notice is a major pain in the ass, but sometimes people simply don’t have the option of waiting 24 hours to see a house.

When Dr. J and I were house hunting for our move to North Carolina, we were working on a hell of a tight schedule. Our agent had pulled some listings for us the weekend before and called all of those people well in advance. However, as we were driving around, we saw signs for other houses we wanted to see before we left at noon the next day. If we had had to wait a full day to see them, we probably would have missed most of them, because we HAD to get back to Kentucky and be at work the next day.

Sure, expecting someone to leave their house this very instant so you can look at it is ridiculous. Any reasonable buyer will tell you that, but an hour or two should be adequate notice. As for unfriendly animals, they can go into a crate or backyard so people can see the house. Leave a note telling them where the dog is, and to avoid it. If they can’t see enough of the yard to suit them, then they can arrange a second look at a time that suits YOU.

13

Athena:

Hey, i sympathize. It took me a year to sell mine. But, I’m a sales guy myself, and, you gotta remember to let the agents know who works for who. We also insisted on prequalified buyers before someone could see the place. There’s a lot of people out there who will waste your time if you let them.

I don’t know how you live (I’m kind of a slob) but it would sure as hell take me more than 15 minutes to prepare for a showing. I’d go all the way to waxing the floors, and I also kept some blueberry muffins and chocolate chip cookie mix in the refrigerator. Right before the showing I’d either make some cookies or throw a muffin in the microwave so the house smelled yummie.

My theory was that nobody got to see the dirty hard work of a remote farm. I let nobody see anything that wasn’t straight out of Martha Stewart’s Country Living.

Put yourself in the buyer’s shoes. There’s this house you’re interested in, and you call up to see it in 15 minutes. They let you see it, and it’s not at its best. Or, you say “we’re sorry, we’re entertaining, and this listing does require 24 hours notice to prequalified buyers only. Would you care to schedule an appointment?”

If they just want to see it on an impulse, they may not reschedule. If they’re serious, your refusal will make the house sound like something special, and when they do see it and everything’s perfect that will add to it’s cache. If they’re contemplating making an investment as large as a new house, the decision won’t hang on an impulse appointment.

Which is the better scenario?

Besides, you don’t want to come off as desperate, and you don’t want real estate agents using your house as a filler appointment for people that aren’t really interested.

Sometimes somebody may have an appointment to see one house at 10 am, and another appointment at 2:00. The agent will schedule some filler appointments in between, and these will be appointments who’s purpose isn’t to sell yourself, but to use it as a comparison for others or to kill time.

You don’t need it.

Trust me on this appointment thing.

14

Then when they call, tell them no. We turned down one or two showings when we were in the midst of something truly important. But don’t make it a blanket rule. I just find it a teensie bit ironic that many of the people putting down these rules are the same ones who have had their houses listed for 8-12 months.

If you’re selling your house, it should NEVER take more than 15-30 minutes to make it absolutely perfect for showing. I’m as big a slob as the next guy, but this is business. One missed showing could cost you serious money.

Realtors never use a house for “filler”, IMHO. They screen every house they show on specific criteria given to them by the buyer. If they show the customer things that do not meet their needs, the customer will quickly get discouraged and/or mad.

And the realtors do indeed work for you. You shouldn’t get pushed around, but you should also understand their primary objective is the same as yours: to get your house sold for the most money possible. That’s how they get paid.

15

Quote by Macro-man:

Realtors never use a house for “filler”, IMHO

I have a friend who is a realtor and he does use houses as ‘filler’. If he is showing several houses in a neighborhood to the same couple, he will schedule the most overpriced house first. It seems like a waste of time but when he shows the fair-market-priced houses the buyer is more receptive to the price. He says that if he doesn’t show the overpriced house first then they are more susceptible to thinking the other houses are overpriced and try to bargain more and so lose the house.

I asked him why some homes are so overpriced and he said many times it is based on something external like that they owe more on it then it’s worth so they want to get out with no debt or they price it so they can get out of their mortgage and cover another purchase/debt. Sometimes a large tax is passed through, like a new road or sewer hookup, and they want to get out of paying by moving but still want full price for the house. Other times, they price it high because they know buyers may want to bargain and so they have the freedom to bargain down to the price they really want. This backfires because if a home is priced high, most buyers won’t even bother to make a bid and many realtors refuse to spend the considerable time writing up a bid significantly below the asking price.

If a house is still on the market within 2 months, let alone 6-12 months, then I think it is safe to say that it is overpriced, probably very.

16

It depends on the market and the time of year and the house.

My 90 acre farm in the sticks wasn’t as easy to sell as a townhouse, you know?

17

Scylla, I appreciate the comments, but I have serious doubts about the appointment thing working in my area. Firstly, I don’t talk to agents who want to show my house, so I can’t do the “Would you like to set up an appointment” The way things work out here is that the agent who wants to show a house calls the office of the agent who’s listing it, and then I get a call from my agent’s office.

In the 8 months the house has been on the market, maybe 10% of the calls I get for showings are on a 24 hour notice. The vast majority call in the morning and want to show the house in the afternoon.

Anyways, as an update as I know you are all sitting on pins and needles wondering when I’ll sell my house, we went out and looked at the competition last night. After seeing 6 or 7 houses in our neighborhood and a competing neighborhood, I feel that our house is priced competitively. I’m also more confident that it shows well. The market is what’s killing us - there’s been 2 homes in our neighborhood sold since the beginning of the year. That’s extremely low compared to last year.

We’re considering dropping the price now to something like 10 or 15K below what it is, so that when people look at houses ours is priced MUCH less than the comparable homes. Maybe then we’ll sell this damn thing.

18

Market has a LOT to do with it. I learned a lot yesterday, spending time with my agent. Pricing has been very difficult - last spring, homes similiar to mine were being listed about about $370K and sold for between $350K - $360K. Mine’s been priced between $360K and $350K since January (gradually dropping the price) and we’ve had exactly one offer. (We didn’t take the offer for a variety of reasons - it was low (at the time), they wanted a contingency, and it was around the time that the deal for our new home in Michigan fell through. We weren’t exactly motivated to sell at that point.)

So what we have is a market that is, at best, flat, and probably moving downwards. It’s been difficult to establish a price. We obviously want to get a good price out of the house, but at the same time, we need to sell it. We’re considering dropping the price to $335K - a bargain basement price, definitely. But still $90K more than we paid for it 5 years ago, can’t really scoff at that!

19

By Athena:
We’re considering dropping the price now to something like 10 or 15K below what it is, so that when people look at houses ours is priced MUCH less than the comparable homes. Maybe then we’ll sell this damn thing.

I would be very surprised if that doesn’t do it.

============================================
By Scylla:

My 90 acre farm in the sticks wasn’t as easy to sell as a townhouse, you know

I do not have any experience in selling or buying businesses but I imagine they take much longer to sell. I also imagine selling a home in a place that has little or no market, like a very small town, would also be more difficult.

20

This is probably very true, and indeed this type of customer may be more receptive to waiting a while to see it, as opposed to the typical 3 br, 2bath buyer. That sounds more like a business for sale than a residence. Anyway, best of luck!