Selling

Sellers: What To Know About Hosting Home Showings in 2021

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When it comes to selling a home, there’s only so much great preparation, staging, and marketing can go before your most interested potential buyers want to see your home in person for the first time before submitting an offer for it.

However, in the current age of COVID-19 and all of the precautionary red tape that’s come along with it, hosting in-person showings safely can pose a bit of a challenge.

While home showings (and even open houses) weren’t prohibited even during the most severe of lockdowns last year, most responsible Realtors® in 2021 have spent lots of time reconsidering their approach to showing homes.

To give you a better idea of what we’re currently doing — and what you should be doing if you’re selling your home too — here’s what you need to know about hosting home showings in 2021.

The hectic seller’s market of 2020 has carried into 2021, and we’re expecting this fall to be just as busy as last year. Ensure you’re prepared for what promises to be a frantic seller’s market by reading about How Sellers Can Make The Most Of A Hot Market here.

What To Expect From Visiting Buyers

Once a potential buyer is at the stage where they’re ready to come and visit your home in person, you should expect their real estate representative will have done their due diligence on your listing and your expectations of them.

Because we help both buyers and sellers at Sidorova Inwood, we know what that should involve. In-depth buyer education sessions should take place between buyers and their agents before they ever think about booking a showing appointment.

Here, Buyer Representatives should run through all of the particular features of a listing their client is interested in, going into particular detail about factors that their client might like or dislike about the property. In doing this thorough vetting of your listing, your potential buyer will not only have a chance to reconsider whether they want to visit your home but know precisely what to expect and look for once inside.

The first step to every successful home sale is to get an accurate evaluation of its current market worth. To find out what your home is currently valued at, sign up to Get A Free Home Evaluation here.

Scheduling Showings

Although the concept of a scheduled home showing isn’t new to anyone in the industry, everyone’s started paying them much more respect. Previously, if a buyer was a few minutes early or late to a showing, it was typically no big deal — they could walk right in and find the Sales Representative eager and waiting to show them around.

More recently, however, with all of the precautions around contact tracing and social distancing, time slots for home showings are run on a much tighter ship — and we’re happy about it.

These days, potential buyers who want to come and see in person generally have anywhere between 20 to 30 minutes to view a listing. Once that time is up, it’s time to leave the home and let their Buyer Representative lock up and place the key back in the lockbox for the next agent to use.

This way, there’s no rubbing of shoulders between passing parties of buyers, there’s no guessing as to who buyers might’ve come into contact with, and it affords you with a more reliable schedule to know exactly when you need to be out of your home and when you can safely return.


At Sidorova Inwood, we help sellers in Toronto every day. Learn more about how we can help you prepare and then execute a lucrative and successful home sale by reading our informative guides here:


Safety Precautions

When buyers — or anyone else, for that matter — enter a home, it’s the selling party’s responsibility to ensure that the home is well equipped with all of the necessary safety essentials to prevent any health hazards.

What do we mean by that? Well, for starters, it’s essential any visiting buyers wear masks inside your home, even if they don’t already wear one around their Realtor®. To ensure buyers follow this rule, you can lay out a sign visible upon entry to your home. Similarly, signs requiring visitors to clean their hands next to bottles of sanitizer at your home’s entry are also common practice these days.

From there, many of the other precautions are largely up to your discretion as the seller — if you don’t want a buyer to enter a certain room or touch certain things, signs that read “Do Not Touch” are also appearing more frequently in listings these days too.


Do you need help finding a qualified and experienced listing agent in Toronto? Ensure you know where to look and who to look for by following our guides here:


What You Can Do To Prepare

Away from setting out your hand sanitizers and appropriate signage, sellers can also complete a few more preparatory measures ahead of each home showing as well.

With the help of their Realtor®, you can choose to either layout printed feature sheets for your listing that potential buyers can pick up and take home with them, or create a digital QR code feature sheet that they can scan with their smartphones and reduce waste and clutter while reducing the need for their physical touch.

Then, once your in-person home showings have all been scheduled, it’s crucial you vacate your home for the duration of all of them. If your Realtor® is able to conveniently schedule all of them around a shorter period of time — possibly over the course of a weekend — then it’s ideal if you can book accommodations to move you and your family out of the home completely.

Whether you stay with friends, family, or book a short holiday in a destination of your choice, removing the obligation for you to return home during your showing period is the best way to stay safe and avoid unnecessary health risks.

Are you ready to see how we can help you sell your home for its full potential value? Book A Free Seller’s Consultation here to get in touch with us directly.