Showing Your Property in the Post-COVID Boom

If your property is vacant, then showings are relatively straightforward. However, if you're still living in your property, organizing the extremely high volume of interested buyers can be difficult. To minimize your inconvenience (and to encourage the highest sales price), we focus this buyer demand into the shortest reasonable showing window - usually 3-4 days. These best practices will also help you sell your home with the least amount of disruption possible.

Vacate Your Property for the Weekend

Buyers are conditioned to view new listings as soon as they hit the market. This means that we can set a showing window of 3-4 days and be confident that all motivated buyers have seen your home. We recommend simply leaving your property during the day from Friday to Sunday, and if you are able, for as much of Wednesday to Sunday as possible. During these times, we'll efficiently schedule showings and allow as many buyers as possible through your listing. Since you're simply not there, there's no complicated scheduling to worry about.

Allow 2-3 Open Houses During This Period

Most buyers work with buyers agents and many will want to view the property alone with their agent. However, many buyers take advantage of the flexibility of open houses to view listings at their own convenience. We recommend holding 3-6 hour open houses on Saturday & Sunday. If it makes sense, we sometimes recommend an additional open house on Friday.

Use a Scheduling Service

Even though your property is vacant & easy to show, we've found that using a scheduling service (think "Calendly for real estate") helps reduce confusion & traffic jams. We will set up a scheduling service that allows up to 4 agents per hour (outside of the open house hours) to schedule private showings. This service will notify you of the new showings, but it doesn't require you to confirm anything. An added bonus is that this allows us to easily collect feedback on these showings.

Allow Some Flexibility

We generally focus showings through Sunday and collect offers through Monday. Many times, very interested buyers will want a "second look" before submitting their final offer. If you can accommodate these showings (on your schedule) it is usually in your best interest, as it encourages the most interest possible.

After this first weekend, the bulk of the inconvenience of selling your property is over, but you will need to make your property available a few times for the winning buyer.

  1. Property Inspection

    Even though we have likely provided a pre-inspection and your new buyer may have no option period, there's still a chance that they will want to have the property inspected by their own home inspector. This generally takes 4-5 hours and is scheduled very soon after you've gone under contract. The buyers often attend the inspection, so its best if you can leave the property for this time.

  2. Appraisal

    Appraisals are relatively non-intrusive, last 1-2 hours, and are usually performed 1-3 weeks after you go under contract. Buyers will not attend an appraisal and you are welcome to stay or leave for this time. Even if your winning contract contains an appraisal waiver, there will likely be an appraisal if financing is involved (though the buyer has guaranteed to buy, no matter the outcome.)

  3. Final Walk Through

    Most buyers want to take a final look at your home right before closing. This is somewhat of a formality and is functionally to make sure that nothing in the property has been damaged before closing (since the time they put the property under contract.) The final walk is not a time to renegotiate terms, so there's nothing to worry about. They usually last around 1 hour and it's best if you vacate the property during this time.

  4. Other Considerations

    It's not uncommon for a buyer to ask for access to the property to take measurements, show the home to friends/family, or for any other number of reasons. It's important to understand that this is a very exciting time for the buyer. We generally recommend accommodating reasonable additional access requests. Sometimes (but not often), a buyer will ask for an unreasonable amount of access, and during these edge cases, we will discuss how to address these unreasonable expectations with their agent.

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