None of us have ever experienced anything like the Coronavirus Pandemic before. No doubt it will become one of those ‘Remember when?” times, like Pearl Harbor, the Moon Landing and 911. It’s natural to hvae Fear of the Unknown, and this is certainly unknown territory for everybody. Even our Government leaders and the so-called “experts” seem to change their opinions on a regular basis, and even the “facts” seem hard to pin down. But if you want to move, it’s new and challenging, but not impossible. And if you need to move, you need to move.
So Total Solutions Real Estate wouldn’t have earned that name if we didn’t come up with a solution to how to buy and sell houses during the pandemic. Actually, we can’t take too much credit, because there are Real Estate Agents and RE Investors out there who have been working with Active Duty Military Personnel who have had no choice but to buy & sell homes virtually. Often times the Agent and Client never met in person, and sometimes the buyer never saw the property they were buying until they moved in. Real Estate Investors have long bought and sold houses, land, and even larger buildings sight unseen. “How can you do that?” “Well, when you buy stock in Ford, do you fly to Michigan to tour the Ford Factory? Do you inspect their offices? Do you visit all their car dealers? Of course not.” (And come to think of it, as a Real Estate Investor myself, I have bought homes without ever being there using Google Maps and the advice of local professionals, and in fact I own a home in Florida that I have never seen to this day, and I’ve been collecting stead rent for years without a single problem.) So you see, it’s all about what we’re used to. So… WE CAN DO THIS!
I’m not saying to buy a home without seeing it, but I am saying that we can do this with minimal personal contact. Here is a document we use (thanks Kevin Ward) that shows some of the basic procedures we are using to buy and sell houses.
Oh, and I should mention, NOW IS A GREAT TIME TO SELL AND BUY A HOME! I’ll get into that in more detail in a coming blog, but suffice to say, the people who are NOT sitting this out right now are the serious buyers and motivated sellers. And isn’t that who you want to deal with? (Nobody likes wasting time with tire-kickers and looky-loos.) And for you SELLERS, what is the most irritating thing about selling your home? having tire-kickers and looky-loos trampling through your home and snooping around your personal belongings at all hours and invading your privacy. Well, guess what? NO MORE OF THAT! Now, at the beginning of the process, we film a “VIRTUAL TOUR” of your home – which, by the way WE CONTROL – and then we use TECHNOLOGY on our websites and marketing so that Buyers can “see” your home. And if that’s not enough, we can have “Virtual Open Houses” that are interactive, so the Buyers can ask questions and the Seller or agent (me) can answer questions or SHOW answers in real time. At some point we DO want to go inside in person, and there are now Rules and Procedures that we follow to ensure that there is extremely minimal risk of contagion: For example, if I were to take a Buyer Client into a home for sale, we
-Ask the Seller to turn on all lights and open doors and windows when we arrive
-Wear booties over our shoes, gloves on our hands, mask over our face
-Don’t touch light switches or door handles
-Elbow bump the homeowner on the way out.
No, this is not your father’s buying a house procedure, but it works and WE CAN DO THIS!
In closing, think about this. We have all been using a product called “DocuSign” for major transactions for several years now. Thirty years ago, if I’d told you that you could click on this “E-Mail” a few times and it would legally be the same as if you had signed a sheet of paper made from a tree, you would have said I’m crazy. It’s all steps in the evolution of the buying process. Here’s another. Not too long ago, real estate agents had to buy nice roomy sedans so their clients could jump in and they would drive them all over town looking at houses. That’s already disappeared for the most part. I look at the bright side in everything, and the bright side of the Pandemic is that it has forced us to accelerate technological gains in our society. Just as Buyers aren’t flocking into Open Houses or touring seller’s homes at all hours any more, so too are our Freeways running at full speed… even at rush hour! Here’s to thinking that some of the good changes – virtual tours and working from home for those who like to – become permanent. I wouldn’t be surprised if twenty years from know we’re telling our kids or grandkids, “I remember there was a time when the Freeways were bumper-to-bumper and sellers would let all kinds of possible buyers into their home, hard to believe huh?”
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