During the restrictive lockdowns of 2020, most Realtors® across the GTA and Ontario recognized that they needed to pivot their business to help cater to an increasingly online demographic. Although real estate is considered an essential service and home showings were permitted during the lockdown, many agents decided to take a more digital approach to showcase properties. This meant investing more in high-end photography, video, and virtual tours.
As COVID cases in Ontario decline, many buyers and sellers are feeling more comfortable with the idea of entering a stranger’s home for a showing or an open house. In fact, the province also recently announced that open houses are now permissible under new guidelines, although, our team still prefers to avoid them for now. However, things are not completely back to normal in our area. There are many things we need to do to ensure our clients are safe, comfortable, and confident during showings.
Here are a few of the things we’re doing to make sure your next in-person home showing in Milton is a smooth, enjoyable experience — whether you’re a buyer or a seller.
At the Barnett Real Estate Team, we’ve been following the latest COVID-19 safety protocols since the start of the pandemic. To learn more, read about What We Are Doing To Keep Our Clients Safe here.
We Typically Start Online
For our buyer clients, we suggest starting off your home showing process virtually. We call this stage our Market Education stage, and it takes place after our initial consultation. Once we’ve established a solid understanding of the types of properties you’re interested in, we present the listings we believe you’ll feel excited about via our virtual Market Education stage.
Here, we’ll detail all of the important features of each listing we’ve identified for you during an in-depth digital presentation and discussion. We’ll sort out what you like about the properties, what you dislike about the properties, and further inform you about the current state of the listings market to help you gain a better understanding of what you’re most likely to find available.
Once we’ve found a listing of interest that you want to view in more detail, we’ll book an in-person showing with the selling party. This way, we not only save on time by not having to physically visit each listing, but things are also much safer for everyone involved.
If you’re thinking about buying a home, you deserve to feel confident that your Realtor® is always looking out for your best interests. Learn more about How We Help Buyers here.
Showing Time Slots
No matter if you’re a buyer viewing a home in person or a seller navigating through the home showings process, every in-person home showing must follow a pre-established time slot guideline.
While this is no new invention in the world of real estate, gone are the days of mass open houses (for our team, anyway) and loosely scheduled showing periods. Today, we need to respect rigid rules need for the benefit of everyone’s health and safety.
The new guidelines are simple — there can only be one showing at a time with solely the potential buyers and their real estate representative present. Additionally, the showings must respect a 30-minute time block, with no overlap between showings.
Are you planning on selling your home for the first time? You’ve probably got a lot of questions. Read through Our Top 7 First Time Seller FAQs here, or Contact Us here to ask us anything more specific.
How to Prepare for a Showing for Sellers
When acting as listing agents, our team also insists on conducting a stringent set of COVID safety measures during each in-person home showing. No matter who they are, each person who enters a listing we’re showcasing must follow our precautionary measures.
For starters, face masks are mandatory for anyone on the premises. Additionally, we also place hand sanitizer dispensers at the primary entryway of the home and in other high-traffic areas as well.
Should there be any specific items or areas within a home the seller doesn’t want visiting potential buyers to touch, we place clear “No Touching” signs near or on them.
Selling a home is no easy task, even if it isn’t your first time around. To see how we help make the entire home selling process easier for our clients, learn more about how we help sellers from the link below or via our Seller’s Guide.
Your Home Away From Home
In order to mitigate the number of people present during a home showing, we always require our selling clients to leave their homes while potential buyers are viewing the property in person. Sometimes it’s just for a few hours, or occasionally it can be for the better part of a day or two.
However, in some instances, when our selling clients have an extensive amount of home showings scheduled over the course of a short period of time we’ll extend our services to find more comfortable accommodations for them that better suit the time period which they’ll be away from home for.
For example, should a selling client need to vacate their homes for a weekend, we would explore the option of putting them up in a hotel room nearby for the duration of their showings. We find this not only alleviates stress levels for our sellers but also allows us to not have to worry as much about timing issues from visiting buyers.
From a health and safety standpoint, knowing our selling clients are far away from any potential exposure to COVID during their home showings also offers us a lot of peace of mind. And from our client’s perspective, they’re able to enjoy the convenience of staying in one stable location during the showing process, which is especially meaningful to them if they have kids, pets, or work from home.
At the end of the day, it’s our goal to ensure all of our clients feel as safe, satisfied, and happy when working with us a possible.
Whether you want to buy or sell a home, the job of a professional Realtor ® is to make your entire experience as easy and enjoyable as possible. Learn more about Why You Should Work With a Realtor® here.
