Plan showing hours before you advertise
Choose the days and hours you can leave the house, and write them down before the first call.
Showings need an empty-enough house and someone to lock up. Pick the days and hours you can keep for the next few weeks and write them down before the first call. A window you can repeat, such as weekdays from four to six and one weekend morning, is a plan. Call us anytime is not. If you advertise hours you will not keep, the first week will be a string of apologies.
Decide how a visitor gets in, and write that next to the hours. You meet them, an agent uses a lockbox, or someone you hired stands at the door and locks up after. If a lockbox is part of the plan, ask what it costs and who controls the code before you count on it. The cost is the number they quote, not a number you invent. Write who can change the code and when the box comes off the door.
Pair the hours with the clearing routine. The entry, the counters, and the path have to be ready at the start of each window, not sometime during it. If you cannot clear the house and leave it, those hours are not real. That is a reason to hire help rather than a reason to guess. Put the clearing time inside the hour count you already wrote for the week so you do not double-book yourself.
Share the plan before the first request. Put the hours in the listing notes and on a card by your phone. When a request falls outside the window, you can say the next open time instead of inventing one. Review the card each Sunday and change it if your week changed. A plan you update is still a plan. A plan you ignore is how strangers arrive while you are in the shower.
What to do
- Write the days and hours you can actually offer for the next few weeks.
- Decide how a visitor gets in and who locks up.
- Put the clearing time inside those hours.
- Share the plan before the first request, and update it when your week changes.