The Amazing Power of Yes

Here's a secret about being a real estate agent that you probably don't know: we hate any and all irritating administrative tasks, including paperwork, filing, record keeping, and especially, scheduling appointments. After all, we became real estate agents thinking that we would spend all of our time with you, our beloved clients, showing you beautiful homes on lovely sunny spring days while birds chirped and rabbits frolicked nearby.

Years ago, there was a television commercial for a real estate company that showed a woman putting her child into a bathtub and hearing an annoying real estate agent calling, "Hellooo!!" as she barged into the house with clients. We have been battling against this stereotype ever since! Trust me, we don't want to bother you during dinner; we'd like to be eating dinner ourselves. But, since you want to sell, and we want to help our clients to buy, here we all are.

Scheduling appointments is one of the more complicated tasks we perform on a regular basis. So many questions go through our minds: which houses should we see? (sometimes my client chooses, sometimes they choose with my input, sometimes they ask me to suggest a sampling of houses) How many houses can we see without them all melting together in our minds and making us totally confused? (I generally recommend no more than 8 without stopping for a meal or a break for at least an hour. And that assumes that we are taking good notes and nicknaming the houses along the way..the Pink Palace, the Yellow Dog, Blue Nightmare, etc.) How long will each showing last? (A surprisingly short period of time, I have found. An average showing is usually not more than 15 minutes.) How long will it take to get from one house to the next? Will we go together or in separate cars? (people with car seats and kids sometimes want to follow, people who like to talk amongst themselves to process what they've seen sometimes like to follow as well.)

Once the scheduled is drafted, the calls begin. Sometimes we schedule via a call center, sometimes we call the listing office, sometimes we call the listing agent, sometime we text the listing agent, sometimes we call the homeowner directly, sometimes we can only schedule appointments online. Which brings me to my plea: say yes. When you are contacted to confirm or decline an appointment to show your home, say yes. Say yes quickly. Because if it takes a while for you to get back to us, something disastrous can happen! It goes like this: I am scheduling appointments for three different sets of clients over a two day weekend. Each set of clients is seeing 6 or 7 homes. Most of the appointments are immediately confirmed. Some I have to wait for a call back, or a text back, and some mysteriously...... never respond. Since I am a people person and not necessarily a detailed administrator, I might miss the fact that one of the twenty appointments never responded. And I might......show up. And the alarm might go off. And I might be standing there feeling like a total idiot while we wait for the police to come....not that that's ever happened.....

And, while it may seem very reasonable to you, as a seller, to ask the agent to change the time slightly, by thirty minutes or so, it becomes a logistical game of Jenga to try to restructure the block of showings to accommodate the request. And so, we might just.....skip you. Yes, we might. And our buyer, who was so excited about seeing your house, just might feel a little bit put off. "What do you mean, we can't see the grey house on the corner? Oh well, I really hated that kitchen anyway. And it was overpriced. Good luck to them trying to sell if they can't ever show it!" And that's how it happens.

But, I do have some good news. Real estate agents and our buyers are understanding, and we are forgiving. If you are able to say yes to that last minute, dinner time showing, we are very forgiving if you don't have time to make everything look mother in law perfect. I tell my sellers, if you can say yes, it's perfectly OK for you to wait until the buyers pull up in front of the house, and you can slip out the back door and watch them from your neighbor's house or take a spin around the block until they leave.

I sold my own house a couple of years ago. That's when I really understood the power of yes. I had my house cleaned and smelling like fresh lavender for every single showing. Countertops gleamed. Towels were fluffed. Except for the one showing, the last minute showing, where the agent called me directly and said, "Hey, Mary, you're not on our schedule, but I think my clients might really like your house. Can we possibly come by in about 15 minutes?" I wasn't even home. I had to ask my husband to straighten up and get the dogs out of the house. I'm sure he didn't listen to any of my rapid fire instructions about lavender and towel fluffing. I know that it wasn't perfect or gleaming. But those were our buyers. And they forgave us our imperfections. Bless their hearts.