Covid has changed many aspects of our lives. For this Los Angeles Realtor it has really changed our business model. Are Sunday open houses making a comeback? Several months ago, the ban on open houses was lifted. But there were restrictions. We could only be in the home for two hours, and the number of people who could be in the home was limited in size. If the open house was 2-4 PM, at 4 PM the doors need to be locked because the showing agent had to leave the home. Too many rules and too easy to make enemies by making people wait outside until others leave.
I haven’t had an open house in over a year. And frankly, I don’t miss it. Some of the homes we sell are vacant and it’s simple enough to put a lockbox on and leave it at that. Before the vaccination, we would have agents schedule appointments so that just one group was in the home at a time. But since the availability of the vaccine, we no longer schedule appointments for vacant homes. There is a lockbox and agents can go anytime during daylight hours.
Showing protocol for occupied homes has changed. We don’t schedule appointments until we have a prequalification letter. Hopefully this demonstrates that the buyer is ready to purchase, not just house shopping. We continue to use hand sanitizer and booties.
What has really changed for us is that if a prequalified buyer does not have a Realtor, our Team requests that they sign a buyer brokerage agreement. This simply states that if they purchase the home we show them, we will be the Realtor representing them. If they decide on purchasing a different home, they can use any Realtor they desire. Seems simple and fair. The buyer brokerage agreement has been available for years, but before the pandemic I never used it. When the pandemic first started, our Team did not want to risk our health with unnecessary exposure.
So for this Real Estate Team, we have more of our weekends free. We are not tied to Saturday and Sunday open houses, which as you can imagine really cuts into a weekend. Some weekends we have appointments and some we don’t.
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