From Homescape

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

The real estate market in Charlotte, NC, is healthier compared to most across the country. We currently have about a five-and-a-half-month inventory available marketwide, according to the 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 May 5, there are 2,1606 active listings in our MLS, which means that if you’re selling a home in Charlotte, you’ll have competition.

How to keep a buyer
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 plenty of other choices available, it’s just not likely. Now, I know that each home 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, when you have competition that 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 with both sellers and buyers in Charlotte 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 ….”

Perspective buyers should know that the showing agent and seller could have a packed schedule. It’s important that they shouldn’t insist on having a tour time changed on a whimsy. If buyers were plentiful and listings were scarce, it would be a different discussion. But when I’m out showing a 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 wouldn’t be able to see everything.

Scheduling a showing
Case in point: I was showing a property last week in the luxury home community of Highgate in Weddington, NC, which is 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, and they needed to find a house to complete the move. I gave a day’s notice on showings, which is a lot of notice in this area. One of the sellers 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 onto 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 view the home in our original showing window. The seller panicked when the realization hit that we might not be able to adjust to their schedule. We had already traveled a good distance away from the community at this point, and my clients had already found three homes they really liked, so they decided it wasn’t worth the aggravation to go back (yes, my buyers chose not to go back when offered that option).

If Mr. and Mrs. Seller are not 100 percent on board and cooperative with the buyer’s agent and showing agent, it’s hard for your house to sell. I know it’s a pain to keep that house clean and to get up and go cruise the area at the drop of a hat. 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 accommodating 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.

Leigh Brown