In order to SELL Real Estate, you have to SHOW Real Estate

It's Tuesday and I'm finally getting around to catching up from the weekend. The past two weeks have been SLOW (Bears in the playoffs and few people doing real estate.) Next weekend the Bears are in the Super Bowl - so nothing will be happeing in Chicago. Given all that - EVERYONE was out shopping this past weekend.

What kills me is that both selling agents and sellers just don't seem to get it. There are many truths to real estate; two of which surely are 1) in order to sell your home you have to show your home, and 2) the person bringing the money (ie- the buyer) gets to say when.

(See our previous post on the unique nature of Chicago real estate showings.)

Here's my experience last weekend:

Wednesday 8am - Start making phone calls to set up Saturday appointments. 10 requests for a morning buyer client and 2 requests for a quick tour with an afternoon client. Result - one confirmation.

Thursday 8am - Starting making repeat phone calls to get appointments. Result - one more confirmation; one outright "no, I'm having an open house on Sunday, come then only", 9 - still no answer.

Friday 8am - Start making calls again to try and get showings. Results - 4 confirmations, 2 no can do's, 1 who said she purposefully ingnored my calls to see if an offer they got earlier would go anywhere (they did come to agreement so she didn't want to bother with any more showings), 1 no because the owner decided the weekend was the perfect time to have the unit unavailable while they had a contractor refinish the wood floors - but please come on Sunday. and 1 still never called back.

So in the end - I was able to get 6 of 12 showing requests, five "no" answers and one who just never called me back.

At the same time, we serviced all our listings and didn't turn down a single appointment request. See a pattern here?

So here is some sage advice for all of you out there who are interviewing agents: Along with all the other questions the pundits tell you to ask, here's one - "Just how available are you to show and sell my house?"