As you prepare for a career in real estate, remember this: Creating an atmosphere that makes potential buyers feel comfortable viewing a property, asking questions and envisioning a home as their own is the most critical thing you can do when showing a property.
The bottom line is that most buyers buy with emotion. Here are six tips for setting the stage when showing listings:
- Start with feelings rather than facts. Too often, agents come loaded down with everything but the kitchen sink when showing a listing. Forms, MLS description, stats, numbers—the works. There’s a time and place for everything though, and when first introducing buyers to a home, loading them down with information robs them of the ability to get a feel for the house.
Let your buyers tour the home at their own pace and then, only when they are done, give them a professional flyer or a copy of the MLS description and encourage them to write down a feature at the top so they can better remember properties at the end of a long day of looking at homes.
- Don’t share the price when you first pull up to a property. Many agents make this mistake and it sets the tone for buyers to comparison shop when looking at homes. If they ask the price up front, simply say, “Everything we’re looking at today is within your price range, let’s get a feeling for the home, then we can talk details. Focus on whether it feels like a place you could live.”
- Park across the street, not in the driveway. Sounds trivial perhaps, but it makes a big difference. When you park across the street, rather than the driveway or front curb, it creates a better visual experience for buyers because they can take in the whole view of the home.
- Let the buyers control the preview. Let the buyers lead the way in terms of what they want to see and in what order. For example, if a buyer first heads for the dining room, and the agent pulls them instead to see the living room first, then it causes the buyer to no longer be really present in the experience. As you tour the house, if there is a feature you’d like to point out in a room, do so—just let the flow of the tour be on their terms, rather than yours.
- Resist sharing your opinion. The truth is what is important or a big deal to you might not matter in the least to a buyer. I’ll give you an example: I recently toured a property for an investment project and the agent immediately launched into a ten-minute discussion about how it would cost $10,000 for a noise-barrier fence to be put up on the property to block traffic noise. The funny thing is, I didn’t hear the noise—it didn’t bother me. However, the agent just added a $10k additional sticker price into my decision-making process. Don’t introduce problems that may not be problems.
- Politely ask the sellers to not be home. If it’s your listing, explain nicely how important it is for them not to be in the house during showings. Nothing quashes a buyer experience quite like having the sellers hovering. It makes it very uncomfortable for people to view the house fully, ask the questions they want to ask or have the ability to envision themselves in the home.
These simple steps will help you present yourself as a seasoned professional and create the better experience for your buyers which will lead to more sales. That’s a win-win-win!
You’ve got this. I’m here to help with a passionate community of Power Agents® that can be there for you as well. Learn more at www.ThePowerProgram.com/NewAgentSuccess.
Darryl Davis, bestselling author of “How to Become a Power Agent in Real Estate” and owner of Darryl Davis Seminars, has trained and coached over 100,000 real estate professionals around the globe for more than 27 years. He is the founder of the Next Level® real estate training system, The Power Program®, which has helped agents double their production over their previous year. For more information, and the new agent tools that can help take you to your Next Level®, please contact darryl@darrylspeaks.com or visit www.ThePowerProgram.com/NewAgentSuccess.
