This is 2015. Having buyers’ agents leave business cards on the kitchen counter of your listing is so passé. Now, thanks to companies like Showing Suite, all that is available online or on your phone. With their technology, you can not only track visitors to your listings, but gather together their feedback, contact all of them easily (for example, if you drop the price, or the listing falls out of escrow and comes back on the market), and find data about comparable showings in the area. They even provide an app to help buyers track the listings they visit. In this video, learn more about Showing Suite from Rick Bengson, CEO of Showing Suite.
As with our other interviews, our goal is to bring you information about ways to make your business better. This is not a paid advertisement for the product, nor is it an explicit endorsement of one product over another – it’s just an interesting conversation with someone whose services might come in handy for making your business run better.
BF: Hi, it’s Brian Fox, I’m with ReboReports, and I’m here today with Rick Bengson of ShowingSuite. Rick, can you tell us a little bit about your product and how it helps realtors?
Rick Bengson: How it’s going to help realtors? We’ve been in the business for 15 years, all over North America, and we’re the widest-used showing system there. But what it’s going to allow you to do is provide transparency into all the activities while your property’s being shown for your sellers. So your sellers can log in or they can download your app, they can see all of the showing activity, and what it’ll also do is it’ll automate gathering the feedback on all of your showings so that seller can see all of the showings, they can see all of the feedback, and then once you have that feedback, what it’s going to help you do is it’s going to help you get price adjustments, price reductions. The seller will log in, they’ll see something like “72% of the agents who showed the house said we’re above market value. We’re above market value by an average of $13,525. We’ve had three showings in the last 30 days on this property. An average home in this market gets 6.2 showings. So, Mr. Seller, based upon us looking at that, what do you think we should do?” An obvious question is, “we need to drop the price.” I’m not telling you, everybody else is telling you, so that’s a real powerful tool when they’re using the system. The other thing that it’s going to allow you to do is “Ok, now I’ve got that price reduction, I can push this out to everybody who’s shown that property. I can email everybody and say ‘We just reduced the price $10,000. You had shown this to everybody, you had shown this to the buyers on the home, now’s the time to bring in an offer.’” Or they can create multiple offers. This is how I create multiple offers. I can email everybody who’s shown that house, say “We have an offer that we’re looking at until 5 o’clock tomorrow. If your buyers are on the fence for making an offer, now’s the time to do that.” Just another little nugget, what they can do on the listing presentation is, they can show them how you’re going to get those multiple offers and you can also say, you know, “God forbid if we’re in escrow and it falls out due to the fact that a buyer’s transfer doesn’t come through, let’s say, I can let every agent know who’s shown our property in a matter of a couple of minutes, that we’re back on the market and to bring in another offer, instead of waiting for them to find it on the MLS that it’s back on the market.” It’s all available in mobile apps. We have mobile apps that you can use, you as the listing agent, you can also, there’s a copy that the buyer’s agent can provide feedback or they can do it via email. There’s also an app that you can share with buyers to help them manage all of the showings as they’re going through the properties, and they can take notes, pictures, videos and save all the information on their showings. So.
BF: It sounds like a great tool. I didn’t know anything about it, I’m very happy to be able to get the information on Showing Suite, and I’m sure our listeners, our viewers will be very excited about it as well. Thank you very much, I appreciate it.
RB: You can check it out. If you go on the site, it’s a 30 day free trial, there’s no obligation. After that, it’s month-to-month, so I would highly encourage – you can use the free apps, or, if you have one single listing, try it on that listing.
BF: Very good. We’ll do that. Thanks Rick, we appreciate it.
