Just a few years ago, there were several services which handled showings of homes for sale so that listing agents and their offices didn’t have to handle showing requests themselves. Each of those showing services would send email feedback requests to the showing agent beginning right after the showing.
Last year, a company called ShowingTime bought Centralized Showing Service (which we used) and now virtually all brokers are utilizing that one company to send feedback requests to showing agents and to forward responses to listing agents and their sellers.
As I’ve written in the past, the best feedback request is one which asks a single question — “What’s your buyer’s feedback on this listing?” — and provides an open text area for the response.
Instead, ShowingTime’s default email asks a few stock questions such as rating the showing “experience” and saying whether the listing price is high or low. It looks like this:
Asking the buyer’s opinion of the price is useless and not smart — if I were submitting a contract I’d say it was high even if it’s not. If I were previewing the house before listing a competing home for sale, I might say it’s too low. Here’s the custom feedback template I created for all my listings:
Agents can change the default to one question with open text, but it’s not easy to do. I had to ask support how to do it.
Here are the instructions for readers who are agents using ShowingTime: 1) Log in to ShowingTime. 2) On the left, expand “Feedback” 3) Below “My Feedback,” click on “Form Design & Settings.” 4) Enter name of your template. 5) After making any changes to the Settings, click on the tab “Feedback Form.” 6) Click on “Add Free Text Question.” (You can enter more than one.) 7) Click “Save Changes” 8) Click on Preview Survey to make sure the form you designed is the one that will be sent to all showing agents.
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