The CoronaVirus and Real Estate
What Can Your Realtor Do To Protect Buyers and Sellers?
There are many buyers in the market right now, and sellers don’t have much confidence in putting their home on the market, but I’m still seeing homes go under contract during these uncertain times. As Realtors, we need to look at different solutions for both buyers and sellers to help individuals and families reach their goals, while keeping them safe at the same time.
A unique problem is how do we accomplish the goal of selling and/or buying a home when everyone is legitimately freaked out about potential exposure to the coronavirus, and traditional open houses, broker tours, and daily showing appointments have becoming more concerning?
What can a real estate agent do to help solve this new problem and protect all involved?
After doing research with the CDC YouTube Channel for accurate information, and then watching this TEDX Talk to learn more from a Global Health expert, and also reading what the National Association of Realtors recommended, it became clearer to me what I, as a real estate agent, can do to help keep my clients safe during the real estate sales process.
Let's start with a couple of the reasons why the traditional way of buying and selling a home today is probably not in the sellers or the buyer's best interest with the concerns of the coronavirus.
Buying a home:
The biggest mistake that a home buyer (and their agent) are making is they are not being thorough enough in their INITIAL home buyer consultation, which should include digging in to the following:
- Exactly what they would be willing to buy
- The lifestyle desires & priorities
- Their criteria for features
- The deal-breakers
- Purchasing power and remodel budget
- Property types, models, lot size, and all options
- Pros and cons of different cities, counties, and neighborhoods.
Professional buyer’s agents do this level of buyer consultation upfront, saving everyone time and helping their buyers reduce the need to drive to and walk through too many homes that just aren’t a good fit for their priorities.
Solution: Buyers and buyer’s agents need to have a thorough initial consultation before going to look at any homes in person. We need to go as deep as humanly possible into your desired home criteria and your priorities, in a safe office environment, at your home, or over the phone and really explore every nuance of what you want in the house and new community. We can have this consultation safely using these solutions:
1. Conference calls
2. Zoom video conference
3. Safely meet at your house
4. Meet at our office in a conference room that I would sanitize in advance.
A top buyer’s agent should be able to help you really narrow down your list of priority homes to see before even getting in the car.
Second: professional buyer’s agents can:
1. Go safely preview property FOR YOU and do a live virtual tour using FaceTime.
2. Set up safe private showings coordinated with the property’s listing agent.
3. Have discussions with the listing agents about the specific details of the property to determine whether or not that property is something that the buyer should see. (digging for any deal-breakers)
Ultimately keeping people safe from unnecessary exposure is the new protocol for Realtors who have buyers and/or sellers who are in the market to transact business now. For home buyers, this is truly when the value of a top real estate professional can make the difference in not only saving you time, but also keeping you safe while providing hyper-local real estate expertise and transaction management.
Schedule your buyer consultation by calling or texting Jake at 904-803-1218
Selling your house:
You want to sell your home but don't want a big open house and multiple buyer tours throughout the week. You want only the most serious buyers to come view the home. As listing agents, we can do a number of things to minimize the number of buyer prospects that visit your home. The most important task is to make sure the buyer's agent thoroughly pre-qualifies their buyers to ensure that there are no features of the home that are obvious “deal-breakers” for their buyers BEFORE coming to physically walk through your home.
Naturally, we can tell every buyer and buyer’s agent that the sellers have strong concerns about the CoronaVirus. Please use your best judgement on who you let into your property. And we, as you representative, will reserve the right to refuse access to anyone that we suspect may be showing signs of illness, but we will not even get to that point until the buyer prospects have been properly vetted to determine their motivation for seeing your home in particular.
We all can use our best judgement. Instead of sending the whole family to look at a house, maybe the agent could just bring 1 family member to the 1st showing of your home. Placing some rules and restrictions on the in-home visits can help to eliminate “lookie-loo buyers” who may not have been properly pre-qualified by their agent, allowing me to protect my selling clients from unnecessary exposure to random people in their home.
The new home seller marketing plan:
For home sellers, we will be offering an added feature to our already robust list of marketing methods. Matterport 3D presentations will allow buyers to walk through your home online virtually, which will help them decide whether or not the property is worth going to see in person. Sometimes, these tours eliminate the need for a buyer to walk through the property before making an offer to purchase the property. Watch this short video about how the Matterport technology works...
We need to give buyers as much detail as possible so that only the SERIOUS buyers make an appointment to come visit the home. With this technology, no matter if we are in a hot market or a cold market, we do not have to worry about our “heavy pre-qualification methods” compromising your sales price because we are still showing the home to the SERIOUS buyers who have genuine interest in the home.
In summary, we will be qualifying all the buyer tour requests in advance to mitigate excess in-person home tours, and will find the best possible buyer and make the sale… Keeping everyone safe! Yet still, achieving the goal.
Regardless of our current global challenge, there are still people that need to buy & sell real estate. Now more than ever, Who you work with Matters!
Call or text Jake to book a consultation phone call : 904-803-1218
