communication with seller

A Tip for Sacramento Listing Agents About Showing Followups

SupraWEB-Showing-DashboardMy personal belief, as a top-producing Sacramento real estate agent, is every single one of my sellers deserves to hear about all of their showing activity. I mean, just put yourself in your seller’s shoes. Your home is for sale, you see business cards on the table when you come home so you know agents have shown it, but you hear nothing from your Sacramento listing agent about those showings? You would have no idea about what’s going on if your agent doesn’t follow up.

And that is not a good place for a seller to be. That, people, is a place of anxiety. My intentions are to never make my sellers anxious or stressed out. Part of my job as their listing agent is to make the process of selling a home in the Sacramento Valley move as smoothly as possible for my sellers, with the fewest hiccups and disruptions.

For example, even if I have nothing to say, if for some reason there has been no showings for a week and not much has happened in the neighborhood, I still try to check in with my sellers and provide them with updates, even if it’s nothing more than # of hits in MLS. For crying out loud, something probably sold within 6-block radius or a new home came on the market, and sellers might want to get that information from their Sacramento listing agents. You think?

I am constantly analyzing why a home might not yet have an offer. The difference between me and another agent is I try to share those thoughts with my sellers — to come up with a new strategy if my existing strategy is not giving us the results we want. With some homes, we just need to wait, be patient and continue present marketing because there might not be as many home buyers in that particular price range.

But to not follow up after an actual showing by a buyer’s agent with buyers in tow, well, that’s unthinkable in my book. Following up with the buyer’s agent is easy, yet many agents don’t do it. They say buyer’s agents don’t respond, and that’s true, some of them don’t. But some provide valuable buyer feedback. By contacting buyer’s agents, I’m also giving them my email address so they can quickly address a concern their buyer might have had but they didn’t yet have time to ask me.

Here’s how Sacramento listing agents can do it. Go to MLS and click on your listing to open it. Click on the box that says “SUPRAweb Showing Activity,” which is located under the row of photos on the very left of the page. That will open a small window in your browser showing all of the activity for that particular home. Don’t stop there. Instead, click on Log On to SupraWEB, on the right-hand side. Sign in with your user name and password.

This will take you to your Showing Dashboard, which reveals all the showings for all of your listings. You can change your dashboard date range but I keep mine set to the past 2 days because I constantly check this dashboard. Right there, in front of your face, are the emails, times accessed and all of the information you need about every single buyer’s agent who showed your listing. Click on the email, and it will automatically open an email for you to send the buyer’s agent a message.

And there you have it. Now you have no excuse not to keep your sellers updated with feedback from agents who have showed their homes. This makes your sellers happy, both of you informed, and it gives you a chance to build a rapport with the buyer’s agent.

Subscribe to Elizabeth Weintraub\'s Blog via email