Real estate agents are enhancing how they market properties online to compensate for the inability to run open houses.
With the coronavirus pandemic forcing real estate agents to abandon traditional home showings, many are turning to virtual tours and other techniques to keep their businesses running.
“Sellers are [now] very, very apprehensive about opening their homes to groups coming in,” Greg Vasil, CEO of the Greater Boston Real Estate Board, said in an interview last week. “Buyers are apprehensive about being in large groups.”
While crowds may have swarmed South Boston’s bars the Saturday before St. Patrick’s Day, the same could not be said for most homebuyers, Vasil said. Rising awareness of the COVID-19 outbreak by and large kept attendance suppressed at most open houses that weekend, he said.
Not even hand sanitizer stations and thorough, post-open house cleanings will be enough to entice most homeowners and homebuyers to countenance a traditional open house going forward, Vasil and other real estate professionals told Banker & Tradesman. Redfin has gone so far as to declare its agents will only show houses to a maximum of two clients at a time.
“Open houses are dead, for now,” said Shawn Moloney, broker-owner of Hanover-based Momentum Realty. “I’ve been advising my people to go down to personal showings.”
No ‘Catfishing’
To cope, Moloney and his team plan to fall back on techniques they developed serving overseas and out-of-state clients: home tours via services like Facebook Messenger and 360-degree photos of each room in the house.
“We use Zoom, we use Facebook, we use WhatsApp – whatever the platform is that people prefer to go on. I’ve had [people] on Facebook calls where I ask them to tell me where to point the camera,” he said.
The challenge, Moloney cautioned, is in making sure a property is represented fairly. If a buyer has to rely on getting a sense of a home through remote tools like these, it’s important agents are judicious in how they edit images, he said.
James Sanna
“I compare it to an online dating service. You don’t want to ‘catfish’ people,” Moloney said, referring to a situation where someone is lured into an online relationship using a fake persona, “but I know some Realtors like to play with photos, to put shine on a floor that doesn’t have it or use a fisheye lens to make a room look bigger.”
These enhanced digital marketing techniques may help agents boost a property’s exposure while potential buyers are largely hunkering down at home, said Meg Steere, an agent with Berkshire Hathaway Commonwealth Real Estate in Watertown. But most buyers will still likely want to see a property for themselves, she said, in order to inspect its less photogenic details like furnaces and confirm what they think they seen in a photo.
As the coronavirus epidemic forces most of Massachusetts to hunker down at home, it’s unclear if even a new suite of tools can keep home sales going strong, Steere said, even if the state and lenders can find ways to conduct key parts of a home sale remotely, like the in-person signing of deeds and mortgage documents.
“There’s going to be the group who’ll decide that they’re fine living where they’re living until things settle down, but there’s also the other group who – for one reason or another – has to move ahead with a purchase, but I think that group is smaller,” she said. “A lot of people will be put into a holding pattern. Buying a house is a huge endeavor.”
