Should I Stay Or Should I Go?

Should I stay or should I go? That famous song by the Clash so succinctly expresses the problem many vendors experience about viewings; should I stay in during a viewing or should I go out? It’s something we can sympathise with at SaleBoards; we understand that we’re dealing with people’s homes, not just a well-arranged pile of bricks and mortar. People feel strongly about their homes and want to have them both well presented and any questions well answered. Furthermore, no one knows the quirks or cubbyholes of a property quite like the owner! However, the flip-side of this is that applicants can often feel quite pressured if they know the vendor of a home is in and so won’t always ask as many questions or voice so many opinions.

In our experience, it’s often about personalities as much as anything else. Both agents and vendors are able to put a client at ease, but it’s not something everyone is very comfortable with doing. Part of what we pride ourselves on at SaleBoards is having friendly, approachable staff that are able to make clients welcome and comfortable. While people sometimes do have questions, a good agent will answer as many as they can, note those they can’t and feed them back to the vendors; but often people just need time and space to process a property and develop some thoughts about it. However, we’re not the homeowner and don’t know the properties as well as someone who lives there.

But there is one aspect of viewings that people often overlook. Estate agency is not the safest profession in that we daily meet strangers at properties and this presents a potential hazard as we have no idea really who applicants are and what their background is. As a company, we have policies and steps in place to negate this risk but this should be an important consideration and one that we take very seriously. Needless to say please do be careful if you’re not using SaleBoards.

However, if a vendor is comfortable doing their own viewings, it’s worth remembering that people need space to think, time to work out if they could live in any given home, and that its very unlikely to be the first person who views a property who will buy it so try not to pressure them too much! One of the beauties of a traditional agency like SaleBoards is that we can work it both ways: we’ll not pressure you into conducting viewings if you don’t want to but will completely understand if you do!