RISMedia, June 14, 2011— As the real estate market in the Pacific Northwest continues to thrive, REALTOR® Carrie Foley recently found the balance between doing the work and chasing the work. Previously, Foley had been tipping too far in favor of chasing. To offset this, she went looking for a solution and found Showing Suite™—the perfect counterweight to put her job back in its proper balance, while helping her build a new and lasting network of contacts.
In the days before she discovered Showing Suite™, Foley found getting any productivity out of agent callbacks to be a challenge.
“Returning my calls and providing feedback was very low on an agent’s to-do list. After a typical week when five to 10 houses were shown on any given day, it was understandably hard for showing agents to remember my clients’ properties—so the feedback was generally not helpful.”
But all that changed when Foley received a Showing Suite™ feedback request. “I immediately saw Showing Suite™ as a problem solver,” says Foley. Not only does Showing Suite™ provide a quick, easy-to-use and automated system to collect feedback, it also enables Foley to focus on the important part of her real estate business—showing homes to clients.
With her own branding on every correspondence, Foley has set Showing Suite™ up to forward feedback from the showing agent directly to her clients. Not only does this keep her clients in the loop, it also removes her from the sometimes risky position of being the messenger.
“Everybody knows what happens to the messenger—when it’s about price, it’s always hard for a selling broker to have that conversation,” she says. “While it is necessary, it’s usually a conversation we don’t want to have.”
But with feedback going directly to her clients, Foley is finding they are more willing to act quickly when they learn showing agents are talking about their property being priced too high.
“I had a seller actually call me to suggest lowering the price of their home,” says Foley, who believes that the suggestion to lower the price of a home is often better received when it comes from potential buyers. Not only does Showing Suite™ provide feedback regarding the price of a home, agents can also leave suggestions about the condition of the home as well as ideas to make a property more sellable.
“Coming from me, sellers may tend to think I want them to spend more money, or drop the price to make a quick sale,” continues Foley, “but Showing Suite™ helps eliminate the need for me to give my clients negative feedback.”
According to Foley, the beauty of Showing Suite™ is that it’s hands off—once she puts the data for a listing in the system, she receives emails when new listings have been shown, and when feedback has been received. “I get notified on my smartphone as it happens. When it’s a question or objection, I can click on the email or phone number and connect immediately with the showing agent.”
More often than not, Foley finds that the feedback is neutral, but she still makes time to go through the activity on her Showing Suite™ account to review everything that has happened during the week.
“This allows me to touch base with the seller, or determine if I need to re-contact a showing agent,” Foley says. “As a sole client user, Showing Suite™ helps me get listings. I can present the system to a seller, which puts me above and beyond my competition. Today’s sellers want immediate feedback—they’re stressed, they want to hear from me often. The fact that they are getting these emails the same second as me is very comforting.”
For more information, please visit www.showingsuite.com/article.
