The other day I illustrated how a certain marketing strategy backfired on a listing my Buyers were interested in buying. The offer never was submitted on that property because the agent had written in the listing comments that offers would not be presented until Monday. My buyers were ready to write the offer on Saturday, but we held off because I didn’t want the agent sitting on my buyer’s offer for 3 days. In the intervening time that lapsed, a new listing came on the market and my Buyers wrote an offer on that one which was accepted immediately by the Seller. You can read that story here.
Today I’m going to outline another boneheaded tactic that I see from time to time in listing comments. Last week I saw it again. A new listing popped up that looked interesting. As I scanned the details and decided I would go preview it for one of my Buyers, I noticed in the listing comments it said “No showings before {date}.” It was a date 5 days from the day the listing came new on the market.
This has always been a head scratcher for me – listings that get entered into the MLS with instructions NOT to go show the home until a later date. I honestly can’t even think of a reason for doing this. With the ‘delayed presentation of offers’ tactic, I at least know what the other agent’s faulty logic is, but in this case, I can’t even come up with a guess as to what the strategery might be, other than thinking it must simply be impatience on the part of the Seller and/or Agent to hurry up and get the listing online as soon as possible. But nothing, in my opinion, justifies putting a home on the market with instructions to agents NOT to go show it.
The very most important time for a new listing in Austin TX is the first few days on the market. I don’t know exactly how many deals we’ve written on houses that were on the market only a day or two, but it’s been a bunch of them, including the one we wrote Sunday that was just one day on the market. As good homes become harder to find and prices continue rising in the hot areas of Austin, a well prepared home, priced right and staged and ready for the market, has a good chance of selling in the first few days. For example, in Austin MLS Area SWW, Southwest Austin, where Sylvia and I are most active, there are at present 96 “Sale Pending” listings. Of those 96 listings already under contract, 33 of the listings went Pending in 5 days or less. That’s more than 1/3 of listings that didn’t last more than 5 days on the market before receiving an acceptable offer. Wow! I’m not kidding when I tell Buyers we need to be ready to move real fast when the right home shows up.
All listing agents know or should know that a quick offer is a real possibility in this market. Why then would an agent close the door on that possibility and essentially eliminate its chances of occurring? All I can think of is lack of experience and/or incompetence.
Experience, knowledge and competence do matter in the real estate business. We have Austin real estate agents out there listing properties with comments that essentially say “don’t bring me an offer” and “don’t show this home”. Amazing.