If you are occupying a home you’re trying to sell, one of the biggest challenges you’ll face is making the property available for home showings. As someone who has personally lived in and sold a staged home before, I know how much of a headache this can be. In an effort to go about your life as normally as possible during this process, it can be tempting to make the home available only during certain days and times, and only if you are given 24 hours' notice. Unfortunately, the reality is that the harder you make it for agents to show your home to buyers, the less money you will make on the sale.
It seems reasonable to expect that if someone really wants to see your home, they’ll wait around until you can accommodate them, right? Unfortunately, this is often not the case. It’s true that if you have an incredibly unique home in a very sought after area, buyers will be more patient when it comes to scheduling home showings. However, your home will usually have enough competition from other listings that if you aren’t careful, a buyer will simply move on and become interested in another property.
In order to understand the importance of this issue, it helps to put yourself in the shoes of an average home buyer. I work with a lot of buyers, and one of the most important things to remember is that, just like sellers, they’re very busy people with very busy lives. They typically can't schedule home showings far in advance, because many times, they don’t know what their schedule will be like on a certain day. I’ll often get calls from buyer clients on a Saturday morning asking me to set up showings for six or seven different properties in several different communities later that day. I have to quickly map out the best itinerary to fit in all of the showings. If the listing agent on one of the properties gets back to me and tells me that the owner can’t accommodate a showing that day, or they can’t accommodate one during a time that works with my client’s busy schedule, I’ll try to reschedule with my client, but it often never happens. Why? Because the next week, my buyer client becomes interested in properties in another neighborhood or is narrowing down their options from the great properties they saw over the weekend.
One way to look at this is that if your home is not available to be shown on certain days and times, it’s not on the market during those times. If it’s not on the market all the time, it’s not being seen by as many buyers as it could be seen by, and when a home isn’t seen by the maximum number of buyers possible, the economic reality is that the reduced competition will drive the price down.
I completely understand a seller’s need to have some boundaries when it comes to making their home available for showings. You have to be able to keep your sanity while you sell your home. One great alternative to 24-hour notice or “appointment only” is setting a rule that agents must give you one or two hours’ notice for showing your home to buyers. If your home is well priced, the numerous showings you’ll get will be hectic, especially if you work from home or take care of children. However, if you can resign yourself to being somewhat inconvenienced for a certain period of time while buyers see your beautiful home and fall in love with it, your bank account will thank you for it.