As an agent, you have most likely been there. You have a new listing, you support your clients in making sure their home is show-ready and prepare a listing that is as enticing as possible. Showing requests start coming in only to leave behind uninterested buyers with negative comments. While it’s “part of the game”, such a situation is still dreadful, for both you and your clients. How can you spin it around and make the best out of negative comments?
Based on agents’ experiences, here are a few tips on how to use negative feedback in a positive way.
Acquiring feedback after a showing is the easy part. With the Touchbase feedback feature, you can quickly collect comments about a property with automatic feedback requests that include custom or default questions. Once you have your feedback in hand, it’s time to share it when your clients. Be honest with them. You would be doing yourself and your clients a disservice by withholding information and risk dragging on the sale for longer than necessary.
However, whether you pass along feedback verbatim or choose to paraphrase it, you can take negative comments and reframe them in a way that is both positive and actionable. Making a plan and identifying concrete actions with your clients to remedy a situation will prevent them from feeling overwhelmed and idle. Recommend improvements and guide them as needed.
Your experience on the field will really pay off when having to share negative feedback with your clients. You know what the trends are and what most potential buyers are looking for. Rely on this knowledge when working on an action plan to improve the chances of getting an offer.
Feedback reveals that the kitchen’s bright red walls are a bit too much? You can arm yourself with decoration and renovation magazines to show ongoing trends. It’s important for your clients to know that their house, albeit perfectly suited to their tastes, must be seen as a beautiful, neutral canvas that potential buyers can see themselves living in.
Another way to address less-than-positive feedback is to provide your clients with relevant market statistics. Proving the comments’ accuracy through data will help soften the blow and clearly demonstrate why some changes may need to be made to the listing. Data will also help clients to not take the comments as a personal attack but rather as a reflection of what the current market trends are.
Whether feedback is positive or negative, its most important attribute should be its helpfulness. Potential buyers aren’t crazy about the neighbourhood or find the house too close to the sidewalk? Not much you can do about that.
However, as you start acquiring feedback and making improvements to your listing, make sure to review your feedback form to see if your questions need some tweaking. Is the feedback providing you with the kind of information you are looking for? Are the comments constructive and actionable? If not, you can easily make changes in Touchbase. Make sure your questions are short and direct, use a grading system if you want, and always leave room for comments.
While negative feedback is never pleasant, there are always ways to use it to your advantage and make it a valuable part of your selling process. After all, when life gives you lemons...