Your odds of selling a Charleston home
... in today's Charleston real estate market improve dramatically when buyers can actually see your home.
The Charleston MLS uses Centralized Showing Service so that Charleston area real estate agents only have to call one phone number to make appointments to view available homes for sale. Sellers have several options on making their homes available for viewing, vacant, courtesy call or appointment.
Since vacant is self explanatory, let's talk about the difference between a courtesy call and an appointment. The best situation you can be in is when your home is in no apology, mint condition and you have removed all the clutter from your home and you straighten up and clean and make your bed when you leave your house. Basically, your home will look very good to potential buyers at any time so when an agent calls to see your home between this hour and that, they and their buyers will be able to get right in.
Now let's talk about appointments. If you have small children, big dogs who are unfriendly and actually may bite or if you have rented your home, you have a different set of circumstances that you may have to work around. Many sellers with small children need an hour to straighten up and take the children out so that the home can be shown. Sellers with friendly dogs can usually keep the dogs in a kennel (and I shouldn't forget cats) and the agents are instructed not to let either get in or out of the home as appropriate. Big mean dogs will generally have to be taken out of the home reducing the likelihood of an insurance claim. Most of this can be done in an hour or two at the most.
If you have rented your home, tenants have rights and are allowed 24 hours before any appointment. They may be agreeable and not require the full 24 hours and that makes it easier for your home to be seen. They actually may be neat and the home might show well. But it has been my experience that homes that are rented are neither easy to see or in very good condition so if you are serious about selling your home, you may want to wait until the lease has expired, put the home back into mint condition and then list it. (By the way, price it to sell when it goes on the market, you don't want it to remain vacant for very long.)
I was showing homes to an out of town buyer the past few days primarily in the Old Village in Mount Pleasant. With over 50 homes for sale in the neighborhood in a fairly wide price range, we obviously weren't interested in seeing every home for sale. But we did select the 12 most interesting homes to see and made the calls for appointments. We were immediately confirmed to see a half dozen homes. The odds of any of those homes selling are very good.
A few homeowners required appointments. We got confirmation phone calls back from Centralized Showing fairly quickly. Once again, those homes have good odds of selling. We got a couple of phone calls asking if we could change the time from what we asked to another time. Because we were focused on a small neighborhood, it was OK but in other cases, you plan your showings geographically and you can't drive back and forth from one side of Charleston to another just to see one house that couldn't be seen when you would have liked to schedule it. Odds of selling in a situation like this are reduced so today's smart seller would be well advised to let buyers see homes at the time they ask for.
Here's the kicker. Let's talk about the 2 homeowners whose homes were for sale and they didn't bother to answer their telephones or check their voice mail and Centralized Showing never heard back from them. We were never able to get an appointment to view their homes. Odds of selling, the proverbial phrase, slim to none and slim left town. What are they thinking?
Bottom line, your odds of selling a Charleston home for sale in today's market go up when you make the home available for buyers to actually see it. There is a lot of inventory on the market with many available choices for buyers so if you want to sell, you have make it convenient for buyers to view your home.