One of the fundamental aspects to selling the house is showing and arranging to show the property. The most basic requirements is to handle telephone enquiries, making arrangements to view the property, ensuring that the house is not in a mess when buyers come for a viewing. If you want to go a step further, you may consider putting up a banner to inform people who are passing by advertising the property for sale, or printing and getting someone to distribute flyers around the neighborhood advertising your property for sale. But rarely owners go to that extent.

One of the main difficulties many owners face is in handling telephone enquiries. Buyers are often an impatient bunch, they are always hungry for information, and they are always eager to get the information immediately. In a slow market, buyers are spoilt for choice when it comes to viewing properties, a delayed response may result in your property not being viewed, or worse losing a potential buyer. As agents, we may get calls from people who are “just asking”, these may not be genuine buyers, but rather other owners canvassing for information, sometimes people who have too much time on their hands and enjoy viewing other people’s homes. Believe me, there are all sorts of people around in this world, and we need to ensure that they are genuine buyers. All experienced real estate professionals know how to weed out such troublemakers, who wastes everyone’s time.

Preparing the home for show-and-tell
Apart from making the home less messy, you may want to put away obvious valuables from prying eyes. If you are not occupying the property, there are numerous improvements that you can do to make the property more marketable.

By our experience, a property that has a homely feeling is attractive, so any shoddy ramshackle is only going to attract a property developer not a home buyer, so make sure that there aren’t any funny odors plaguing the house. Many owners did not inspect the property carefully before they placed it on the market, many a time, it results in a depressed sale price, because of a problem roof, or cracked walls, or an un-kept garden or smelly and dirty toilet.

There have been situations where owners even do improvements to the house prior to selling it. Although we do not always advise it, but a fresh coat of paint, a landscaped garden and nice smelling house with good looking furniture always adds to making the potential buyers feel comfortable and “at home” when they visit the property. And if money is no object, such improvements will definitely add marginally to the sale price, because a happy prospect is always a willing buyer in our rule book.

Some owners believe that they can show their property on their own terms. In a hot market, where properties are selling like hot cakes, yes an owner may dictate the time people may view the property, but in a cool market, you may be required to show the property at the buyer’s available timeslot. As an owner, you must be prepared for this. If your property is vacant, and you do not live there, poses an additional problem, you have to make an additional effort to go to that property for the viewing. One way to reduce such difficulties is to organize back-to-back viewings or a weekend open house. A weekend open house is always good because all the buyers that called during the week will come at anytime during the open house stipulated time, to view the property. This has always been an effective way for agents to save time as well.