Open the Sunday newspaper, or log on to the Chicago Tribune's real estate section, and you will find the familiar listing of Sunday afternoon "open house" opportunities. This is the time when you are invited to stop by for a brief look into every conceivable type of residential property, and at virtually any price point. Look for the modest studio condo, or the stately multi-million dollar mansion. They're all there for a few moments of your idle curiosity or, perhaps, serious home buying evaluation.
But the hard-core open house activity happens on weekday mornings throughout Chicagoland, the time set aside by real estate agents to traverse a wide geographic area in a short period of time, hoping to stay current with the market's latest offerings by ALL broker companies. We agents call it "touring", but this "tour" is hardly a relaxed guided tour of properties for sale. Far from it.
In order for an agent to fully experience the weekly tour, he/she must first determine which communities will be the morning tour for himself. Wilmette only? Or should he try to include Winnetka as well; and maybe that new listing his client is so excited about in Glencoe will be on the tour. The first step is to hunker down in front of the Internet-based MLS the night before tour, and pour over the published listings. This is serious business, folks, determining which to include on one's personal "list" of must-see properties: how many of the 72 in Evanston need to be seen? And the 25 in Wilmette? or the 21 in Winnetka. (Kenilworth's 5 are a walk in the park!) But Glencoe has 16 possibilities. And the spring market hasn't even kicked into high gear yet! Determination of which to include on one's personal tour is a combination of curiosity, client needs and wants, and simply staying on top of what the marketplace is doing as far as pricing and preferences go. And this can be complicated if the agent has agreed to carpool with one or more additional agents who each has his/her own personal agenda of what to include on the tour. Logistical nightmare. And then try to figure out the route to get to all those properties efficiently. Whew!
And one more critical factor in choosing which properties to view on tour is whether there will be snacks or lunch offered by the sponsoring broker. Really. Somtimes an agent will tour on his/her stomach. Hey - agents have to eat to keep their strength up!
And here's the really interesting part: all of this touring activity must take place between the hours of 9:30 AM and 12:45 PM. Exactly. This is dictated by the rules of our North Shore/Barrington Board of Realtors.
The final nuance to all of this is that multiple communities have their weekly brokers tour on different days of the week, enabling an energetic agent to be out on tour more than one morning per week, if desired.
But it's all for the good of the industry and the public; the agent has first-hand views of properties that a client might want to see, or be able to judge better how to price a new listing that will soon be offered to the public, based on how other similar properties are priced. Reading about a listing online, and viewing the photos online, can never take the place of an on-site visit.
Brokers tour: just one more activity that your hard-working North Shore Home Advisors embrace with enthusiasm to better serve the needs of our clients.
2 comments:
I've heard that clients can sometimes join their agents to look at specific homes on broker tour. Is this a common and accepted practice?
Gina, that's a great question! The answer is "maybe." The brokers tours are designed for agents and brokers, as we have already described. Once in awhile we find a "pedestrian" come into a weekday brokers open house, assuming it's permitted, or perhaps because this person is a home buyer and his/her agent has DIRECTED the client to do so. Here is the caveat - non-brokers should only enter a weekday brokers open with the explicit permission of the listing agent, and with the buyer's agent accompanying that buyer. What's the big deal, you might wonder. To be brief, it's a matter of liability (on several levels). It is NOT common practice for members of the public to enter weekday brokers open houses, and it is not typically encouraged by responsible members of the Realtor community. If a buyer needs to view a home for sale, that buyer should be accompanied by his/her designated agent, and optimally at a private appointment. That's the minimum of good service!
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