Gimme some feedback!

If you have every had your home listed for sale, you know what I'm talking about. You get an appointment. You rush around like the lady in that crazy "Company is coming!" video we've all seen, where the woman rushes around her house, yelling orders at her invisible children like, "Put seashells on the doorknobs!" and, "If you haven't made your bed by now, just throw it away!"

You gather up the kids, the pets and the toys and load them into the car. You come back to the house an hour later and scurry around, looking for confirmation that someone has been there--an opened closet! A light turned off! Yes, they came! They were here!

And then you wait, and wait....for the all important feedback. The feedback that your agent gives you about how the buyers felt about the house, whether or not they liked it, whether or not they might be considering it, whether or not they are going to buy it so that you can move into your next house and relax, finally! .....but of course, when you do get feedback, it is rarely very useful or very helpful. Often, it comes in a form like this:

Is the buyer interested in the home? Maybe

When does the buyer intend to purchase a home? 1 to 3 months

How would you rate the home on a scale of 1 to 5? 3

What is your buyer's opinion of the price (no answer)

What can we do to attract an offer quickly? (no answer)

Not very helpful, is it? What you really want is something more like: "Please paint the Master bedroom purple and the buyers will gladly make a full price offer." There are many possible reasons for this, and unfortunately, you don't often get to know what the truth is: maybe the agent doesn't know the buyer very well, and it was hard to tell whether or not they liked your house, or maybe the buyer is just starting to look, and they haven't even definitely decided on which neighborhood they will focus on, or, maybe they have begun to look before their place is actually sold, and cannot make an offer yet on any house.

Some agents don't believe in providing feedback at all. One agent I know says that the only meaningful feedback that an agent can make is an offer. Others don't supply feedback because they don't want to hurt their future negotiation position by saying that their buyers really love the place; instead, they play it cool. Very rarely does the feedback actually provide the seller with a meaningful answer to the question, why isn't anybody making me an offer?? Or, the feedback is something that the seller isn't able to change: doesn't like the busy street, or doesn't like the floor plan, or liked another house better than this one. Hardly gives the seller a clear direction about what to do next, does it?

The simple answer is to look to your agent to provide you with the likely reasons that buyers are not making an offer on your home. More often than not, the reason is price. To put it simply, if your home was $100, everyone would buy it. At its current price, no offers have come in. The magic price at which your home becomes the coveted one that attracts a buyer quickly lies somewhere in between....