But the benefits from doing all that work could be greatly diminished if nobody is around to answer showing calls. So what do you do?
Get the Showings You’ve Earned
Getting more showings sometimes is as simple as answering the phone when showing agents call. If that is up to you as the listing agent, you may be answering calls when you’re out to dinner with the family, or sitting at a movie. Not super convenient, but sometimes that’s how agents prefer to do business.
If scheduling responsibilities belong to your office, that’s another story – statistics show you could be missing up to 1/3 of the showing calls being made on your listing. Why? Because up to 1/3 of the scheduling activity for showings occurs during hours when many real estate offices are closed.
Weekly Distribution of Incoming Calls at an Appointment Center
As a point of reference, the graph below shows the distribution of calls made by showing agents to the ShowingTime Appointment Center to schedule showings. You can see that nearly 1/3 of the calls occur between 7-9am, and between 5-10pm, hours when offices tend to be closed.
Be Everything to Everyone?
The answer is not always to cut into your personal time to show how responsible you are as the listing agent. Yes, you want to sell the listing as quickly and efficiently as possible; but not at the expense of family or leisure time. In the long run, that can lead to burn out.
But you don’t want to miss out on any potential showings.
Multiply that by 4-5 listings, and you’ve really got your hands full. For an average office, multiply that by 40-50 listings and things get chaotic pretty quickly.
The Outsource Option
Not all listing agents or offices want to consider outsourcing scheduling tasks to an Appointment Center, but when you consider the sellers’ best interests, it puts a different light on it. Afterall, the objective is to sell listings as quickly and efficiently as possible, which leads to more listings, which leads to a thriving real estate business.
There are multiple options to consider in most markets, which sometimes includes local businesses who have built appointment centers to serve the local real estate community.
As a reference point, ShowingTime’s Appointment Center answers calls 24/7/365, which gives our listing agent/office clients a tremendous value add to their sellers.
It may even be the thing that sets you apart from other listing agents/offices in your market.
Do you spend too much of your day scheduling and confirming showing appointments? Learn how the ShowingTime Appointment Center helps free up your time to focus on other tasks to grow your business.