Showing Time

(*I first published this piece at about the same time last year, and if anything the situation is worse now. Inventory levels are fiercely low and that means that any decent listing is over-run, with overlapping showings being allowed more and more often.)

I’ve noticed in the last couple of weeks that too many showing requests are being confirmed with a shorter viewing window - 30 minutes rather than the hour asked for - and I don’t like it at all.

The rationale given is that agents want to “give everyone a chance” to see a property. But truth is, it’s often impossible to be precise in estimating arrival and departure times at a house, particularly when you’re out on a tour of several properties, and an hour window is more than reasonable. It’s been that way for years.

If a house is a serious prospect, I don’t know how in hell you’re supposed to give it a good look in thirty minutes, bearing in mind that includes the time needed to unlace the winter boots, and unwind the eight-foot Doctor Who scarf, and sanitize the hands (and then reverse the whole process at the end of the showing).

What this new protocol actually means in practice is that agents and buyers are all over each other now, even if it’s just outside on the front steps, apologizing for an early arrival or a slightly late departure. Everyone’s frozen breath mingles out there like so many cartoon speech bubbles, or like Venn diagrams drawn up to demonstrate exactly how disease spreads.

Contact between multiple agents and clients is being maximized this way rather than minimized. Which is just plain dumb. It’s real estate’s impersonation of the Amazon warehouse, and the meat-packing disassembly line. It makes a bad joke of all our we’ll-keep-you-safe covid protocols.