No More Open Houses?!? What To Do
Summary
How do you get your seller in a multiple offer situation so that you can sell their house for the most money?
Here are 5 Steps to Creating FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) With Buyers:
- Good Price. A good price gets buyers excited because they know that it’s going to go fast.
- Limit Showings. Limit showings to 20-30 minute slots on certain days and times. (e.g. Fri 4-6pm, sat 11-2pm, sunday 1-4pm). Set up a showing calendar on the MLS or use an appointment-setting app like Calendly with a link that the buyers or agent can click to book.
- Clear Instructions. In the showing instructions on the MLS, be clear on how to schedule a showing appointment. Give them the link to schedule and then confirm with a text message or a phone call.
- Easy Appointments. Have a sign rider onto your FOR SALE sign on the house that says, “To schedule an appointment, go to <property website>. On the website, have the scheduling link and other scheduling instructions.
- Massive Communication. Let the buyers or buyer’s agent know what to expect at the showing appointment.
This is all part of what I train called the10-day selling system that allows you to literally sell a listing for 10 days or less. I’ll be training on this in detail at Agent Mastery Live Virtual 2020. Click here to learn more about www.agentmasterylive.com.
Full Transcript
What do you do when you can’t do open houses anymore? And what would you do if you found something that actually worked better than a traditional open house? Now I’ve been training for years a process that I train real estate agents on called, how to do an open house event, where you actually create an event, you get masses of buyers, masses of traffic into an open house, which creates this frenzy of people going like, “Oh no, this house is popular. This house is hot. And we better write an offer on it”. And so you literally create what we call FOMO, the fear of missing out, that would incentivize buyers to write better offers and help your seller get into a multiple offer situation where you can negotiate and get the best terms and price for your seller.
Now understand, whether you’re doing an open house event or when you can’t do an open house event or what can we do better, which I’m going to train you on in this video, is I’m going to give you five steps on what I call the FOMO protocol, where you can’t do an open house, how do you actually get the same result of getting multiple buyers in there fighting for the house and lining up to make offers and into a multiple offer situation, help your sellers get the most?
Understand number one, the goal is to sell your client’s house for more money. That is your responsibility. Now out of that, a secondary goal can be for you to get business, for you to get buyers, for you to get other people to come into the house. And that’s totally cool as well.
One of the problems that we’ve found is that doing virtual open houses did not prove to be very effective. And that was agents would do a virtual open house where they would take a virtual tour and put it on Zoom and schedule it and promote it to their social media and on the MLS, try to get people to all come and watch a video while I do a virtual open house or do a live stream from the property and schedule it and then try to get people watching it so that I could do a virtual open house live at a set time and use that to get offers. And it just hasn’t worked. It doesn’t really create this fear of missing out. And people don’t want to show up live at a certain time when they’re like, “Why do I do this?” If it’s a real open house, then it’s they understand convenience and it’s just the way it goes, they’re not looking at other houses and all of that. But virtual open houses have not been effective.
And so what we did was we created, as a response to not being able to do open houses, is we created what I call the FOMO protocol. The fear of missing out. How do we get buyers to have a fear of missing out? And most importantly, how do we get GMO, which is Get More Offers for your sellers when you put a house on the market?
Now this is all part of what I train called the 10 day selling system, where you can sell literally every single listing in 10 days or less for more money. I’m going to be training that in detail completely at Agent Mastery Live Virtual 2020, which you can find out about, we’ll put a link down in the description below, at agentmasterylive.com and find out about that three day virtual training with me.
But in this video, I’m just going to lay out for you the five steps to use a FOMO protocol that will actually help you sell your listings faster and for more money and represent your sellers better to get multiple offers, to get bidding wars going, to be able to negotiate the highest price of all for your client.
So here are the Five Keys to Creating the Fear of Missing out Protocol for Buyers when you have a listing.
1. GOOD PRICE
All right. Number one is you must have a good price. This is just a prerequisite. If you’re going to get people excited, you’re going to get buyers excited about a property, you’ve got to have a good price. And what happens is now that allows you to have a scenario where all the buyers, when a new property, when your listing hits the market, all the buyers are excited about the new house and they’re also excited about the price.
If you price it high, they may like the house, but they hate the price and so they don’t get excited. But when they like the house and they like the price too, now, people are excited about that house and they’re like, “Oh, I like that house. I like that price.” They allow themselves to get excited and they also know because the price is good, this house is going to go fast.
So again, what we started just by pricing it right, is you’ve already started feeding the FOMO, fear of missing out. When you overprice a listing, you create a different emotion and it’s, I call it FOMM, F-O-M-M, which is fear of making a mistake. And that’s what now buyers are afraid of making a mistake, of overpaying so they don’t get excited, they don’t make offers on the house. So the first thing is we’ve got to get a good price on the house.
2. LIMIT SHOWINGS
The second principle is, you want to limit showings. You want to limit showings. Now the good thing about this is, because of the pandemic, it has made it very, very easy to limit showings because sellers are afraid and buyers are afraid. And sellers are like, “I don’t want a whole bunch of people coming through my house.” And so this also protects your clients from exposure, putting them in situations where there’s a lot of people coming through their house or a situation where there’s a lot of buyers traffic where now buyers are exposed and all that to potentially getting sick and so forth. And so all of these things have really served to make this happen better.
Now, here is how you limit showings. You limit your showings to certain days and certain times. I’m just going to give you some examples and you figure out what works best for you in your market. So when you bring a new listing on the market, let’s just say you could do it based on a traditional open house strategy. One day on a weekend, on Saturday from 11:00 to 14:00 or on Sunday from 13:00 to 16:00. Or you could do a combination of Friday from 16:00 to 18:00 PM, Saturday from 11:00 to 14:00 PM and then Sunday from 13:00 to 16:00 PM. Then you literally have these multiple showing slots and then you set it up on a showing calendar.
Now, a lot of your MLSs, you have showing services where they can literally put the showing calendar and the showing instructions where the agent that has the buyer can click on the showing instructions, click on the showing calendar and they can schedule it. And what you do is you set it up in the calendar in 20 to 30 minute time slots. Okay? Now, if you don’t have a showing service like that in your MLS, you can use a software like Calendly. Calendly is C-A-L-E-N-D-L-Y. And it’s literally an appointment setting app that you can set it up so you can set it up and I’m just going to make it simple. Let’s just say, you’re going to do it from Sunday, from 13:00 to 16:00. So you set up a time block in there, Sunday from 13:00 to 16:00, they click on it, it goes to the calendar. Sunday from 13:00 to 16:00 PM.
And let’s say it’s a fairly small house, 1,500 square feet, and 20 minutes is plenty of time for buyers to go through it and actually get walked through the house. And I want to allot as many people to come through as possible. So if you do 20 minute slots, that’s three buyers per hour can come through and if you get three hours, that’s nine sets of buyers. If I’m going to have a lot more traffic than that, I may need to add an extra hour before or after, I may need to do it on a Saturday and a Sunday, but you get the point.
And I set up my calendar, either a showing calendar or Calendly where in the showing instructions on the MLS, there is a link the buyers can click, or the agent can click to go in and schedule an appointment. And it shows them when the time slots are available, this one’s already booked, this one’s already booked, this one’s available. This one’s booked and that one’s available. And they pick those times.
Now, here’s what it’s doing. You’re limiting the showings, it creates that more of a sense of, “Oh, there is a lot of demand for this house and we got to get in there and see this house.” Now it is also respectful because you’re getting buyers to line up to see this house every 20 minutes, or if it’s a bigger house, you want to schedule every 30 minutes, that’s fine. You’re getting them to line up and see the property without being disrespectful of them or annoying them because you’re letting everybody know, buyer’s agents and buyers, that we’ve got to do this to protect everybody’s health. I’m going to be there onsite. And this is really critical, is that you or somebody on your team needs to be on the site. “I’ll be there to answer questions and to make sure that we’re sanitizing in between showings.”
And all the other showing protocols you need to have in place where people are… If you’re providing masks, gloves, hand sanitizer, asking them not to touch anything, not to open anything, whatever other protocols are in place, you should have that little worked out with your local board or your broker, whatever the rules are in your market. Okay? All that’s got to be in place. But what it’s allowing you to do is limit showings.
3. CLEAR INSTRUCTIONS
Now, here is the… There’s a lot of cool things that are going to happen with that. Now with this limiting showings, you also must have clear instructions. Okay? In the showing instructions on the MLS, you got to be crystal clear. “Here’s how you schedule an appointment, per seller’s request their showings are going to be on Saturday from 11:00 to 14:00 and Sunday from 13:00 to 16:00. And then all offers will be due by Friday evening at 6:00 PM or whatever it is.” Okay? You got to be crystal clear on there.And then you got to give them the link to click on to go schedule a showing appointment and just make it simple and clear. And then once they schedule an appointment, you want to confirm it with a text message or a phone call.
It’s respectful, it’s professional so that everybody knows everybody’s being treated fairly, it puts people under pressure. You also want to put in the instructions things like, to give your buyers so they get their full time slot, make sure that you’re at the house early, so that they get to take advantage of their full time slot. Okay? It’s really important that you have clear instructions on how to do this.
Now you’re also going to do this for buyers that don’t have an agent. And how are they going to do that? Well, when they find the property, you want to have, if you have a property website for your listing or just the link to that property website on your your website, when they click on it, it needs to go where they can set an appointment to see the house and it takes them to that same calendar. And then you find out if they have an agent or not, and now you’re going to be the one that’s there meeting them to show them the property.
4. EASY APPOINTMENTS
So the next thing that you can do is you want to have easy… You want to make sure that they’re easy appointments. In other words, it is easy for people to set appointments.
Now here’s one of the greatest things that you can do is have a sign rider add a rider onto your for sale sign at the house that says, “To schedule an appointment go to 123beachavenue.com.” The individual property website, “To see this house or to schedule an appointment, go to thepropertyaddress.com,” whatever the property website URL is.
And then they go there and it’s got to have a link that says, “If you’d like to set up an appointment to see this house, click here. Here’s the schedule.” And then you can put any things, if they have to be pre-approved or special instructions, or any of that kind of stuff that needs to happen, you want to make it easy for people to set up appointments.
Because what I want is on that day, when all those showing slots are, I want them packed. And what’s going to happen is, you’re going to have your showings start at 13:00 PM, you’re going to have people that are 10 minutes before, they got 20 minutes, they’re going to get there and start 13:00, they go in to show. They’re going to come out at 13:20. When they come out at 13:20, the next buyers with their agent are already there waiting outside the house. They come out and they go in. Those people that just watched the house, they’re standing outside in the yard, and they’re talking about the house and they’re talking about, should they want to make an offer.
And then the next people that are coming for the next showing, they show up early for theirs while there are still buyers in the house looking at the house. The first buyers that went through are still standing out in the yard, visiting with their agent. You’re there to answer questions. You’re there to coordinate, make sure everything is going smoothly. And what you just created is you’ve just created FOMO. You’ve just created that sense of a competitive environment where people are lining up to see the house.
Now this is not manipulative. This is legitimately respecting everybody’s time, doing something that is very streamlined, very time-efficient. It is good for you. It is good for your clients. And it is fair to all parties involved. So you want to make sure there are easy appointments.
5. MASSIVE COMMUNICATION
And then the fifth thing is, you want to make sure you have massive and clear communication with all parties, which means that you want to make sure that you are clearly communicating with the agents, with the buyers’ agents. When they schedule an appointment, I want to let them know, “Hey, here’s what’s going on. And because of all this craziness with COVID and all that, we’re going to keep everything… The seller’s only wanting limited showing, so these are the slots. Make sure you have your buyers there early so they don’t miss out and want to make sure that you respect your time and be respectful to other agents and other buyers that are going to be coming in and so forth. And I’m going to be there to answer any questions, to help you any way that I can.”
And what you are going to be doing is you’re making a very difficult situation work for your client’s advantage and have that sense of demand for this house. This house is hot because you priced it right, you limited the showings, you made clear instructions so everybody knows what’s up, you made it easy for them to see the house. They still got to follow the rules, they got to see the house, and because you communicated clearly, everybody’s respecting what’s going on, everybody’s happy. And most importantly, they’re liking this house. They’re liking this price. They’re getting their chance to see it. They’re looking around. They don’t want to miss out. And so you have buyers writing offers that you can negotiate with multiple offers to get your sellers the best result in the best time.
Now, I know that’s a lot of stuff, but this strategy is working right now for agents all over the country who are helping them get better results for their clients. And when you get better results for your clients, you get better results for your business and your income.
If you liked the video, give it a thumbs up. If you have any questions or comments, post it down below. What did I miss? What are you doing that’s different? Or what tweaks do you have that you put in place and protocols? If you don’t like the video, give it a thumbs down, either way, it gives me feedback so I know what to do to help you in the future play to win and always expect yes.