The only way to get your home sold is to have people viewing it.
Your agent might of put your home on some of the various home tours and caravans for other REALTORS. For example my office of Russ Lyon Sotheby’s has home tours for our various coverage areas on most Tuesday mornings. That’s one way for us agents to keep up with the inventory of what’s for sale and what it is being priced at.
After that you are going to want to see real buyers coming through the door.
If you have an ARMLS lockbox installed on your property the number of times the box is opened and by who is being stored digitally. This is good for security but also good for statistics.
ARMLS publishes a weekly lock box report. Thats gives some idea of how active in general the real estate buyer market is and also breaks that down by zip code. Here is that data plotted against the number of active properties for sale for a few of the zip codes I focus on.
| Zip Code | Active Listings | Lockbox Opens | Average Opens Per Home |
| 85255 | 221 | 887 | 4.0 |
| 85262 | 105 | 310 | 3.0 |
| 85253 | 55 | 188 | 3.4 |
| 85260 | 137 | 553 | 4.0 |
| 85258 | 195 | 857 | 4.4 |
* The active homes only includes listings that are listed as having an ARMLS lockbox installed.
Now this data isn’t perfect. In fact the margin of error could be quite wide on how many of the opens represent actual buyers viewing the home. But it’s a good starting point for a discussion with your agent.
If your home is not being shown in the 3 or 4 times a week range it might be time to consider why this is. It’s most probably one of the 3 P’s. Price, photography or positioning.
Price
If your home home is relatively over priced to market it will not get viewed very much. I hear so many sellers say:
I priced it like this because I was expecting low ball offers!
Not a good plan. I recently wrote about the real estate pricing pyramid. While I couldn’t find data to support that the numbers are true, there is certainly some truth to the principle. There is a reason stores have huge red signs in their windows saying “sale”. People are very price sensitive.
Photo’s
If approximately 90% of home buyers start their home search online, and an even more startling number of 40% of buyers find the actual home they end up buying online it’s safe to say that is an important place to be seen. Photo’s are without doubt the most important part of an Internet house for sale listing.
Remember the photo’s your agent adds to the MLS, are the photo’s seen on Zillow, Trulia and all local broker websites. You can’t sell a house with bad photo’s. But this is what happens when you get great photo’s.
Positioning
To me positioning is pretty much everything else that is being done to bring your home to market. Is your home on all the best Internet sites? Is your agent networking to get agents in to preview the home?
Low Viewings Are The Precursor To High Days on The Market
Some properties are unique. Custom estates, horse properties, lake view homes, there are less buyers for these homes and therefore the number of showings is not as indicative of the health of your listing. But if you have a fairly standard home that should appeal to buyers it’s time to measure the viewing activity on your home against the averages above.
If your home is only being viewed one time a month in this market with such low inventory levels then Houston we have a problem. Now is a good time to address the problem.