It’s an experience familiar to most agents: You’ve helped your client stage their home, promoted the listing and facilitated a showing, only for the hard work to result in nothing more than an uninterested buyer who leaves negative feedback. While you may accept that this comes with the territory, it’s definitely not a pleasant situation to be in for either agent or client. Fortunately, there are ways that you can make the best out of what may seem to be a bad situation.
ShowingTime helps agents acquire feedback and share it with sellers. Based on our agents’ experiences with using that feedback to support clients, we’ve put together a few tips below to help make sharing negative feedback a positive experience.
Contextualize the feedback
As unpleasant as bad feedback may be, there’s no point in keeping it hidden from your clients – honest feedback is essential for making changes to either the listing price, the home itself or both that will earn offers. In fact, a key advantage of a showing scheduling service like the ShowingTime Appointment Center is that it makes the collection of feedback simple, with feedback requests sent automatically after each showing.
Yet while it’s necessary that you do share buyers’ observations your client receives, as an expert in your market you can take even the most negative critique and reframe it in a positive, actionable way for your clients. Think of yourself as less of a censor and more as an interpreter.
ShowingTime’s Listing Activity Report can help with this, allowing agents to review all activity details for the life of each listing. By default, feedback is sent to the listing agent for review; the agent can then easily forward the feedback to seller(s) and also publish it in their report. If the feedback is worded in a less-than-productive way, however, the agent may opt to paraphrase the response instead of sending it along verbatim or wait to share the feedback during a meeting with the client in-person to provide a face-to-face explanation.
Regardless of how the feedback is shared, ShowingTime gives agents full control, empowering them to have necessary discussions with clients in a manner that fits their personal approach.
Prove the validity of the suggestions
One way to soften the blow of negative feedback is to demonstrate its accuracy – and, by virtue, how making changes to the listing reflects the changes suggested by the feedback and matches market trends. To do that, turn to relevant market statistics to make the business case for incorporating the less-than-positive feedback. As we’ve discussed previously, a market stats solution like ShowingTime’s InfoSparks can be used to provide empirical evidence supported by current, accurate data to highlight why suggested changes to a listing could pay dividends.
Negative feedback can understandably evoke strong emotions. The right data can ground the conversation, keeping tempers cool and all parties engaged on a plan of action to improve the prospects of getting an offer.
Use feedback to inform future feedback requests
Sometimes commentary is bad not because it’s negative, but because it’s simply unhelpful. No matter how you square it, sometimes feedback is too opaque to prove immediately valuable for a seller. Nevertheless, that feedback can still be useful for informing the development of new questions to solicit future commentary that’s more helpful. Sometimes, simply tweaking how you ask your questions can mean the difference between helpful comments and frustrating, vague responses.
Using a solution like the ShowingTime Appointment Center’s feedback template feature, an agent can increase the likelihood that future comments are constructive and sufficiently descriptive by letting agents (and their clients) ask the right questions.
Click here to learn how to create customized Feedback Templates in your ShowingTime account today! https://apptcenter.uservoice.com/knowledgebase/articles/460016-creating-feedback-templates
Showtime and InfoSparks are benefits provided to all SWMLS Real estate professionals at no extra cost. Contact the MLS Help Desk at 843-8833 or mls@gaar.com to learn more or to request a training for your office.
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