How to Get Showing Feedback in Claremont, and What to Do With It

Every seller wants feedback and most of the feedback they get is worthless. Not because agents are unhelpful, but because the question they are asked is unanswerable. "Any feedback?" produces "Lovely home, not quite right for my buyers," which tells you nothing you did not already know.

Feedback is a real tool. It is just badly used almost everywhere.

Why the standard request fails

A buyer's agent has no obligation to give you anything, has a client's interests to protect, and is being asked an open question at the end of a busy day. The path of least resistance is a compliment and a decline.

There is also a genuine conflict. If a buyer liked the house and might write an offer, their agent has every reason not to say so. Enthusiastic feedback is often the feedback you will never receive, which means the absence of praise is not the signal sellers take it for.

And an agent who thinks the house is overpriced frequently will not say that either, because it sounds like an insult and they have to keep working with your agent for years.

Ask questions that can actually be answered

Replace the open question with two or three specific ones. Closed and comparative questions get answered; open ones get deflected.

• "Where did your buyer stop and look longer than you expected?" This gets at what worked, and people answer it happily because it is a compliment in disguise.
• "What was the first thing they mentioned in the car?" The first comment after leaving is the honest one.
• "What else are they seeing this week?" The comparison set is more informative than an opinion, because it tells you who you are actually competing with.
• "Is there anything that would move this from a maybe to a no?" Phrased as a fixable problem, which invites a concrete answer.
• "On the price, are they in the range or is it out of reach?" A direct binary question is easier to answer than an invitation to critique.

Ask soon. Feedback given the next morning is far more accurate than feedback given on Thursday about a Sunday showing, by which time three other houses have overwritten the memory.

Separate the three kinds of thing you will hear

Not all feedback is the same category of information, and treating it as one pile is how sellers make bad decisions.

Fixed conditions. Busy street, small lot, adjacent commercial, one bathroom, no yard. These are facts about the property. They are not problems to solve; they are constraints that the price and the marketing already have to account for. Hearing them repeatedly is confirmation, not an alarm.

Fixable conditions. Odor, clutter, dark rooms, an unmowed yard, a dated fixture, a room that reads as a hallway because of furniture placement. These are the ones worth acting on immediately, and they are cheap. If two separate visitors mention the same one, fix it that week.

Opinions. Paint colors, taste in tile, the layout preference of one buyer. These are the loudest and the least useful. One person's opinion is one person.

The only pattern that reliably means something

Sellers over-read single comments and under-read patterns. Reverse that.

The one that matters most is the shape of the traffic. Plenty of showings and no offers usually means the house is being seen and rejected, which points at condition, presentation, or price relative to what buyers are comparing it against. Very few showings at all usually points at something upstream: the photographs, the listing presentation, or a price that is keeping people from clicking in the first place.

Those are different problems with different fixes, and the difference is visible in the numbers rather than in anyone's comment.

The second pattern worth watching is repetition of a specific fixable thing. One mention of a dark living room is noise. Four mentions is an instruction, and the instruction is usually about lighting or window coverings rather than about the room.

Open house feedback is a different animal

The agent hosting an open house sees something no showing report captures: where people slow down, where they turn around, what they open, what they say to each other in the hallway, and whether anybody walks the yard or just looks at it from the door.

That is genuinely useful observational data and it should be written down the same day. It also comes with its own bias, since open house visitors are a mixed group and many of them are not in the market at all. The visitor mix and what it does and does not tell you is part of why whether open houses still sell homes in Claremont is a contested question rather than a settled one.

Sellers should ask their agent for that observational account specifically, not just for the written feedback from visiting agents. And sellers should not be the ones collecting it in person, for reasons set out in should sellers attend their own open house.

What to do with silence

Non-response is the most common outcome and sellers read it as rejection. Usually it is just an agent who moved on to their next appointment.

The exception is worth noting. If a house has had a run of showings and produced almost no replies at all, that itself can indicate that nobody felt strongly enough to bother, which is a soft signal about the property's position in the market. Soft, though. Do not reprice on the basis of an empty inbox.

Acting on it without overreacting

The failure mode is a seller who repaints on Tuesday because one visitor mentioned a color. Rules that keep this sane:

• Act on repeated, fixable, cheap items immediately.
• Wait for a pattern on anything expensive.
• Never make a structural or pricing decision on a single comment.
• Distinguish what a buyer said from what their agent decided to relay.
• Keep a simple written log. Memory rearranges feedback into whatever the seller already believed.

The short version

Ask specific questions quickly, sort what you hear into fixed, fixable, and opinion, watch the traffic pattern rather than the comments, and get your agent's own observations from the open house. Then fix the cheap repeated things and leave everything else alone until it repeats.

More on reading a listing's early weeks is on the Claremont open houses hub. Anthony Grynchal has been licensed in California since November 2009.