What a Weekend!
No one in their right mind can say that the Houston Homes Market is not beginning to slow with every month so far this year having more homes come on to the market than sold over the same period. Despite this fact I was astonished to see how many sellers were not making their homes available to be shown.
I had an out of town buyer contact me and wanted to find a home this weekend in the Houston Homes Market neighborhood of Kingwood. We picked out 15 homes they liked and thought out of these they would have no problem finding the place they wanted. However, this was just not the case.
Since they flew in early afternoon on Friday they thought it would be an excellent idea to see a couple of homes late that afternoon to early evening. I made a call Thursday morning to the Centralized Showing Service, a system that agents in the Houston Housing Market use to set showing appointments, first giving five homes out of the fifteen my clients wanted to see. I had figured that maybe one or two would not be available for showings and that we would have three or four to go look at. In my amazement, once Thursday evening rolled around, I had not one of the sellers willing to schedule an appointment for us to go see their home.
I found this a bit annoying and confusing but figured I still had plenty of time to schedule appointments for my client’s arrival. I gave the remainder of our list to the showing service (ten total listings) to the showing service that evening and asked them to call each one and try and schedule an appointment for late Friday afternoon to early Friday evening. Around noon on Friday I had found that none of the sellers were willing to schedule a showing for that evening. I couldn’t believe it out of fifteen different sellers not one was willing to schedule an appointment for a serious and ready to act buyer with almost twenty four hours notice. Furthermore out of those fifteen sellers only three made their homes available to show on Saturday.
So, needless to say my clients are a bit upset. Having planned a weekend out of their life with little time before their move I was unable to arrange for them to see anything on Friday. And now after the majority of their weekend having been whisked away we have only seen three homes. My clients being very annoyed at this predicament have chosen not to look at any of the other twelve homes. So, now all of these potential sellers are out on any possibility of selling their home to my buyer. And because of how they have made me look bad I plan not to encourage any of my buyers in the future to go look at their homes unless they believe it is the perfect home.
I decided to write this blog post to both rant a bit to make myself feel better after a tough day and to plead with sellers in the Houston Homes Market to make your homes available on even the shortest notice. As many buyers will not wait to see your home and they have tons of available homes to choose from. If the home selling process is getting to taxing for you and you do not have to absolutely sell please do the market a favor and withdraw your home. And if you are serious about selling your home please do yourself a favor and make your home available to show. Each and every person that you turn down could in fact be the one who would have bought your home.
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on Sunday, September 7th, 2008 at 11:40 am and is filed under Blogger's Opinion Center.
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September 10th, 2008 at 9:48 pm
I know your frustration! It is not just Houston sellers, it is everywhere! Not sure how they expect to get a timely sale…hope they heed your advice!
September 22nd, 2008 at 8:56 pm
If sellers are serious, really wanting and or NEEDING to sell, easy and quick availability is a MUST! It is hard, having your home for sale, but if you want to do it, sellers need to prepare themselves mentally and dive right in.