Clocks fall back Sunday. Is your showing schedule ready?
Clocks fall back an hour at 2 a.m. Sunday, and starting Monday most of the country loses an hour of after-work daylight. That one hour changes how your week runs. Buyers who tour after work will be doing it in the dark, weekend slots will fill first, and a listing with the lights off will look like nobody’s home. Rework your showing schedule this weekend instead of next week, and you’re far less likely to lose a buyer to a calendar mess.
THIS WEEK'S PRO TIP:
GET YOUR LISTINGS READY TO SHOW IN THE DARK
Get every listing lit before the sun goes down. Ask sellers to put the porch light, the entry, and a lamp in each main room on timers, and make sure the house number can be read from the street. A dark house at 5:30 looks closed, and buyers doing an after-work drive-by keep going. Add a line to your showing instructions saying which lights stay on, so whoever shows it isn’t hunting for switches by phone flashlight.
Then tighten up your own after-dark routine. NAR’s safety guidance comes down to a few habits: tell someone where you’ll be, meet new clients somewhere public before the first showing, and always know your way out. Those habits matter more when the showing starts after sunset, so build them into your evening appointments now.
When you're busy: Shorter days squeeze the same buyers into fewer daylight hours, and most of them will want Saturday and Sunday. When two showings land in the same window, you don’t have to pick one. Post the showing, open house, or lockbox run on KeyPleaz® and an agent in your brokerage covers it while you handle the other.
When you're available: The agents stacked up on weekends need help in exactly the hours you have open. Open KeyPleaz® to claim showings, open houses, and lockbox runs this week. Every daylight lockbox run you pick up is one less errand another agent has to make after dark.
MARKET NEWS PULSE
Builders are carrying 8.4 months of supply, per the Census Bureau’s September new-home sales report out Tuesday. That’s 476,000 new homes for sale against an annual sales pace of 676,000. Of those, 111,000 are already finished, and the typical finished home has been on the market 3.0 months since completion, up from 2.4 a year ago. The median new home sold for $400,400 in September. Every month a finished spec home sits costs the builder money, and that’s leverage for your buyers. If you work with buyers, put new construction on every search this month. If you have listings, find out what the builder down the road is offering, because your sellers are competing with it.
QUICK STAT OF THE WEEK
Before 5 p.m. That’s when the sun sets on Monday, Nov. 2 in New York, Chicago, Boston, and Seattle, and even Atlanta, Dallas, and Miami go dark before 6. A buyer who leaves work at 5:30 will be touring in the dark on weekdays for the next few months. Ask your active buyers this week which weekday windows they can really make, then lock in Saturday and Sunday daylight slots before the weekend fills up.
Open the app and keep your showings covered as the days get shorter.
