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We've come home to find my daughters toys out of their toy boxes as well. To be honest, I haven't minded that too much - I'm hoping it means the parents were busy paying attention to the house, and lingered long enough for the kids to play with toys, and maybe the parents could picture their kids playing in the house once they buy it lol!
In the past, other realtors asked that we NOT leave a card. This was seen by them as us (the showing / buyers agent) might be trying to steal their client by "advertising" our name inside a home listed by someone them or else. I get that.
So I am printing out business cards that say "Thank You for Allowing us to Visit Your Home" and then put our names Judy & Allan Wagner, on the card as well. No contact info supplied. Who can object to that? I ask. But some sellers agents may.
Selling a home is a HUGE job for the seller. Allan and i totally get that. We help by showing them how to tidy up quickly. Plastic bins being the magic bullet. You can clean off a kitchen counter in 3 minutes, pop the bucket in a closet or garage and take it all out to put back in less than 5 minutes. Tricks like that are great and much appreciated by sellers.
There are several quick tips to make putting your home in showing order less painful . But I digress.
Good real estate agents understand that sellers are stressed.
But as in any profession you have a few who are not tip top at their jobs.
I had my own home listed for a few months, and one agent (very experienced fellow) left the key in the lock and the door unlocked and the lockbox (which was attached the the front door) laying open. He said he got distracted because we requested that people not wear shoes inside. We provided slippers and booties whichever one might prefer. So not too difficult.
The greenest thing you can do in a home is to remove shoes, by the way.
We remove our shoes when visiting other folks homes, unless they say No don't bother to do that. It's all about respect for someone else's property.
We also try to call the agent to let them know we have seen the house so that they can contact their client and tell them they are clear to go home. It's just respectful.
We are not perfect so sometimes we forget as well. Or get distracted making sure that the four kids are all outside before we lock up, and that no one in the group is left while using the bathroom you have asked them NOT to use in any of the homes. UGH!
There are a lot of nutty people out there, but as a respectful agent, we do our best to take care of other's property.
Being a Real Estate agent is not an easy job. We don't show three homes tell them to pick one and then run to cash our check like you see on TV.
We had one couple with whom we worked for four years before they bought something. And another couple we showed 94 homes to and they ended up buying a foreclosure.
So it is not an easy job. I am online from dawn to 11 pm. Always available and try to be responsive and respectful (thanks to my mom and dad and perhaps the NUNS!) built some folks are just not respectful. But I LOVE BEING A REALTOR. I am not complaining, just kvetshing (I apologize t my Jewish friends if i used that term incorrectly)
So my thought about selling your own home is to let your agent know EXACTLY what you expect from a showing agent (remove shoes, leave a card, don;t let the rabbit out of his cage, call my agent when you are gone from my home, leave the fan one etc....) TELL them this is what you expect. They can then relate that to ALL agents who call t show your home, either by phone or email the request to the agent. Good agents appreciate the direction. Hope that helps.
I had a showing today and the clients needed a 2-3 hr. window .... and I come home and have no card left by the agent..... We as sellers have make sure the house is spotless and not even common courtesy to leave a card. Just show me you were here! It would be appreciative!
Any other sellers go through this?
Realtors out there? do you leave business cards??
We had very few cards left and I agree that would have been so much better to know the house had been shown.
We would know many times when lights were left on and door to the garage unlocked but I would have much preferred a card.
I'm not sure why there are so many responses in this thread where people are worried about if their house was shown or not. I can't speak for every agent in the world, but I know I'm not in the habit of making showing appointments that I have no intention of keeping. If I suddenly can't make the appointment for some reason, I cancel it. Just another reason why I like accompanied showings instead of lock boxes. There's no question about whether the showing occurred.
It has been about 10 years since I was buying or selling a house but I had one agent who I saw picking up cards that had been left by another agent who had shown a house just before we looked at it. He did not know I saw him pick them up. At the time we were just starting to look and had only used him on a couple houses we were looking at. This was on a Saturday when we had the whole day scheduled (about 8 houses) There were several of them that had cards laying in them (a few were unoccupied and I figured maybe the cards had been there a day or so). I noticed on the second house that a card that was there when we went in wasn't there when we came out. On a later house I actually saw our agent palm two cards that were there (I know others were looking at that house the same day because we couldn't get the time slot we wanted)
I talked to a friend of my mothers who was an agent two counties over (She had said she wasn't as comfortable in our county and at the time the person she recommended was out of town for a couple weeks) And she said that it was considered bad manners to remove cards from houses that weren't your listings but that some agencies did collect cards from houses that other agents in the same office had listed (not the case in either I saw) I mentioned the name of the agent. She tried to make a bland comment about him but I persisted and she said that whenever she showed houses he had listed she always double checked everything in his listing. Two car garages that the second bay wasn't deep enough to fit a standard car ( a laundry room intruded about 5 feet in one of the bays), rooms that were over a foot smaller in each direction, and school districts listed when the district lines had been redrawn several years before (and funny that the school district listed was always the better one whether it was the older or newer district). Her Agency also always read over any contract he submitted on a house they had listed very closely because details were often 'unusual' in his contracts.
I called him up that evening and thanked him for the time he had spent with us and confirmed that none of the houses we had seen met our needs. I also told him that we were reconsidering moving at the time and that we would get back with him if we wanted to have him show us anything in the future. That week the person that had been recommended to us was back in town. We met with her one evening and spent an hour in her office discussing our desires and explaining that we had seen some houses the previous week that didn't meet our needs and were not happy with the agent that had showed them to us. This agent was much more knowledgeable about the local market and over the next month showed a whole series of houses. One Weekday afternoon she called us and asked if we could look at a house that evening. A house that had been on the market six months before had just come back on and she said 'I won't say this is the one but I really think it is what you are looking for' We saw it that evening and she was right. Over the next few days we looked at it twice more and put an offer in on Friday. It was accepted and we've been living in it ever since.
She also helped us sell our existing house (we were able to hold off putting it on the market until we had moved out). That went fine until we found out the title company we used for settlement never finished the paperwork closing out our mortgage.
The Title company office manager gave the company several weeks notice when she was told that her office was closing and she would have to move to an office 20 miles away. The rest of the staff (three people) were told to box up all the paperwork that day and send it to the other office (This was on a Friday we had closed on Thursday). Turns out the lease was up that day and they hadn't been told! We found all this out six weeks later when we received a letter (forwarded from our old address) saying we were late with our payment! We called the mortgage company who said they had no record of us selling the house. They had a request for a payoff amount effective the day of our settlement but had not received any other communication. We called our agent who was surprised and said she would look into it right away. She asked if we could come over to her office so we could do whatever it took to get it resolved rightaway. She called the Title Company office. they admitted they were 'a little behind in their paperwork' because they had closed 3 offices that week and none of the staff had moved to the main office. They promised 'to look into it and get back with her in a day or so'.
We had just walked into her office when that was said on the speakerphone. She said 'You don't understand. You WILL contact the mortgage company today. You WILL send a letter on your letterhead over your signature to my fax machine today followed by a signed duplicate delivered to my office tomorrow as well as the original to the mortgage company explaining that the house was closed on the date the papers were signed, that you recieved all the paperwork from the buyer and the seller who you will list by name in the letter and that it was entirely YOUR fault that the payoff was not immediately sent to them. You will absorb any interest or penalty costs for the time since the settlement. Mr & Mrs Smith have just walked into my office and have heard these instructions. If they are not carried out we will be pursuing legal action. And no matter what I will be notifying the Attorney General's office about the delay in this transaction so they can follow up and make sure there are no other unresolved closings.
She then called the person at the mortgage company that I had talked to to explain what had happened and tell him to expect the Title Company to contact them and to please let her know when they received the payoff on the mortgage or if they did not receive any communications in a reasonable amount of time.
Happily for us it was all resolved (at least for us) in the next couple days. I was glad we had the agent we had.
Next to behind a pretty little plate in plain view -- perhaps on the dining room table -- place a little vertical sign that reads, "Agents, please leave your business card here. Thank you."
It's really hard to walk past that without depositing a card.
I'm not reading through 11 pages, so I'm sure this has been mentioned already...
Leaving a card in not customary in every area. In my area, I have never seen a card left - nor have I left one. To me, leaving a card at an already listed house is a little like soliciting someone else's client. I can see how the card would simply alert the owner that people had actually been in the home. But, we receive a request for and in good form always send back feedback by email. In that way, the owner knows we were there.
Not only that, but our system tells the listing agent who made the appointment. A good agent is going to follow up with all the appointment anyway by phone or email.
Are you serious?Neither is the commission on my house FREE!!
Loves, thank you! That is what I would think!! That is the least they could do!
Middle-agedmom- that doesn't surprise me because you always have informative answers to questions on threads and are very helpful. TY!
Silver- I understand people forget, seriously but I'd say this is the 3rd time..I am anal about any house smells, house is spotless and keep it neat........I wipe out sinks in case there even a single drop of water in it LOL....I am sure some people may not like it but I have hated homes and our realtors have still left cards........thank you for replying!
I don't get upset when a Realtor doesn't leave a card at one of my homes, and I always try to leave a card when I have showings, but, it's a courtesy, not a law. Not everyone is going to behave perfectly every time, some real estate agents I know don't even buy cards. My biggest pet peeve, and I've told this to buyer's agents is that if something was stolen out of the home, and YOU were the one who didn't leave a card, well, then that puts you at the top of the suspicion list.
When I have forgotten to leave a card, it's been because I was in the middle of a conversation, then walked out the door, me following and talking and just plain forgot. It happens sometimes.
I advise my sellers to leave a registry in plain sight, I will even provide the registry for them, all they have to do is display it, this helps get all the names of folks who visit their home.
Holy Smokes!! You average 35 showings per day. That is physically impossible.
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It would be appreciative!
Business card solution
Neither is the commission on my house FREE!!
