Now that you’ve identified the properties that interest you the most, you’ve driven past them and are still interested, its time to schedule a time to view the homes with your agent on a private home tour.  One of the benefits of working with an Buyers Agent is the time you will save by scheduling multiple private tours within one period of time versus calling multiple listing agents to see just their listing.  A licensed Buyers Agent has access to ALL of the homes for sale on the market (not just the properties they personally list or their company lists but all properties for sale by all companies).  This is a great time saver and allows the buyer to see several properties within a couple of hours all at once, plus they have the homes to themselves to view and mentally move into and comment on freely without having a pushy Listing Agent or Seller following them around the house.

For this reason, we do ask that we have some lead time to set up appointments with the seller so that we can insure that they will have the house ready to show and will not be there while we are showing it.  Most buyers are very uncomfortable going through a seller’s kitchen cabinets with the seller in the house.

At Terrace 24, we make it a point to observe the buyer as they are touring the home to pick up on what they like and don’t like through not only what they say about the home, but what their body language says.  We don’t usher buyers through the house pointing the obvious features like you see on TV.  We find that if the crown molding is important to a buyer, they will notice it themselves without us being obnoxious and pointing it out to them.

Our private tours are generally scheduled in no longer than two hour blocks, and the ideal number of homes to see in one day is about 5-7 and no more than 12 at the most.  Through experience we find that after this many homes, the buyer has trouble really focusing and remembering what they saw and hit a point of diminishing returns.  It’s very common to just see one or two properties at a time in the evenings during the week, especially when the buyer has already seen most of the inventory that interests them and just wants to view a new property that just came on the market.

Its a common misconception that you have to look at A LOT of homes before you find the right one.  In reality, we find that the better we are able to educate the buyer about the market through the Client Gateway and neighborhood drives and on working with them to identify the best properties, the more confident they are in their knowledge of value in the market and the less time it takes them to find the right house for them.

One of the services that we offer to our clients in order to save them valuable time is to preview homes for them and shoot a quick video walk-thru with commentary on what we are observing for them throughout the week.  We are constantly out seeing properties and it’s no trouble for us to pop by a home in the course of a day to see if it’s something that the buyer should make special arrangements to either see it quickly before the property goes off the market, wait until they have time to see it, or just skip seeing the home altogether.

Finally, by viewing several homes, the right home will usually stand out to buyer as being the best home for them when compared to the competition.  On the listing side of the business, we always tell sellers that when a buyer is looking at your house and the other homes that meet the same criteria, your house will either help sell the competition, or the competition will help sell your house.  You buy by comparison shopping when you are buying a house and thus, the house that you decide on will stand out to you among the rest for some reason or another, and that’s when you know you’ve found the right house for you.