Redfin: What We’ve Learned So Far Running a Brokerage During a Pandemic

WGAN Forum Founder & WGAN-TV Podcast Host 31.19K Website Atlanta, Georgia Linked In Facebook Twitter YouTube TikTok Instragram Matterport Service Partner Google Street View Trusted Photographer Zillow Certified Photographer We Get Around Network Member	31.19K DanSmigrod private msg quote post Address this user	plus 1 plus 1 plus 1 0
	Video: What Redfdin has Learned So Far Running a Brokerage During a Pandemic \| Video courtesy of Redfin YouTube Channel \| (19 March 2020) Hi All, Here are the key takeaways for Matterport Service Providers - quotes from the video (see full transcript below). ✓ we're not going to host open houses ✓ This is not just Redfin, but they work really well in this environment. And one of them is 3D scans. We use a company called Matterport, you can also use I think there's a company called Cupix and EyeSpy360. ✓ Basically, if you google 3D real estate scans, I think you can find some different opportunities and different companies that you can work with. But what's awesome about these scans is, much like the name they're in three dimensions, and so you can get a whole floor plan and you can see that you basically, from the couch in your living room without ever getting up, they have virtual tours that walk you through the floor of the house. ✓ And you can go in different spots in different ways, and just really get a really good idea of a home. And so if you're a listing agent, and you have a seller, and by the way, the sellers can change very quickly whether or not they want people in their house, you may not know at the start of the listing, you know, when you put the listing on the market, that perhaps someone in the sellers family has a compromised health situation. -- While no one wants to be exploitive of COVID-19, reminder that you - a Matterport Service Provider - solve a real, immediate problem for real estate agents and their home seller clients (and for home buyers). You are helping people! You offer a 24/7 Open House virtual digital twin to replace physical open houses. Your thoughts? Dan --- Transcript - Welcome, thanks for joining us today, my name is Scott Nagel, I'm president of real estate operations here at Redfin. Anthony Kappus is the general counsel at Redfin. And lately, as in like the last seven days, we've been getting a fair amount of inbound calls and questions from other agents, brokers, about kind of everything that's going on today, you know, not in the world, at large, but in the world of real estate. And so we thought, it might be helpful to put together just a really quick program on some of the things, that we've learned, over the last seven days. And a lot of these aren't rocket science, like some of these would be things that you probably would think about, if you're in the midst of a kind of coronavirus situation, where things have gotten pretty crazy pretty fast. But hopefully, this will be an advantage for you. If you're not in that situation, to get a little bit of a head start on thinking about some of the things that can happen in that type environment. - Yeah, mainly one of the things we've seen being here in Seattle, which is where we're sitting today, is that the world literally changes overnight. I think everyone's seeing that. But really, you know, on a Monday morning, you can wake up feeling like you're in a normal world, and that world's completely gone now, in terms of how people are operating, and the toll it's taking on people's lives and their businesses. - Yeah, and that's really what has kind of been surprising for us is how quickly things can change. Like Anthony said, Seattle is kind of, it's been called the epicenter coronavirus, San Francisco, we've got seven counties, that have Shelter in Place Orders. That happened pretty quickly. City of Philadelphia also has an order in place. And so what we wanted to do, is just talk about some of the ways, that you can practice real estate, in these different environments. And let's just start off by some of the things we've talked to about with all of our agents. How do you take care of yourself? How do you take care of your customers? So some of the things we've done is, we've canceled open houses. We don't and we've told all our sellers, we're not going to host open houses there. There have been MLSs, that have canceled the ability to post open houses. And so, that's one way where we've really taken seriously the idea of, okay, we don't want large groups of people gathering together for their safety and for our agents safety. - Well, I think one of the things we've seen in Seattle is, our, you know, to start seeing how quickly people reacted, that our premises really been, how do we keep people safe? First and foremost, how do we keep our agents safe, our customers safe people coming through open houses and that sort of thing that's trying to guide all the decisions we're making. - Right, exactly, and so we've also limited home tours to actual buying customers. And so we've asked all of our customers, don't invite family, don't invite friends, just the actual people who are buying the house. Again, so we can limit how many people are interacting at one time. And then during those interactions, you know, keeping your social distance doing the elbow touch, if that no handshakes, all of those things we've put in place. And then we've also put on our website, when people wanna check out for a tour that if they are sick, we're asking them not to actually tour, not to go out and in interact with our agents, with home sellers, et cetera. - Yeah, I mean, that's what's been so hard is seeing people who want, you know, either to earn a living or to get their house bought or sold, you know, have this motivation, of course to be out, but just really focusing on prioritizing people safety and staying home when you're not feeling well. - Right, so those are the basics, hopefully, those are things-- - That's not news, yeah. - Yeah that you've already thought of. But let's talk about selling homes in a virtual world, and how to make your listing shine online. There's a couple things that we're doing that others are doing as well. This is not just Redfin, but they work really well in this environment. And one of them is 3D scans. We use a company called Mater Port, you can also use I think there's a company called Cupix and EyeSpy360. Basically, if you google 3D real estate scans, I think you can find some different opportunities and different companies that you can work with. But what's awesome about these scans is, much like the name they're in three dimensions, and so you can get a whole floor plan and you can see that you basically, from the couch in your living room without ever getting up, they have virtual tours that walk you through the floor of the house. And you can go in different spots in different ways, and just really get a really good idea of a home. And so if you're a listing agent, and you have a seller, and by the way, the sellers can change very quickly whether or not they want people in their house, you may not know at the start of the listing, you know, when you put the listing on the market, that perhaps someone in the sellers family has a compromised health situation. And we have had sellers change their mind about whether they want people to come into a home, and so-- - Over the course of an hour, or an afternoon just because things are changing so quickly. - Yeah, exactly, just things have changed in that particular location, they've got more concern, and so they're just like, I don't want people in my home. So if you're getting listings ready to go, now, this is one of the things we strongly recommend, that you add one of these scans, if possible, before you think you need it. And that's going to be the theme kind of throughout this presentation. If you're not in a city like Seattle, San Francisco or someplace that has an order and effect, then don't think you've got a lot of time to figure it out. And to determine what you wanna do. Like I would start preparing for this situation now, so that if it happens, you're, you and your clients are ready to go. - Yeah, absolutely. - And so these scans are great. You can add particular call outs on them. So if your seller has something that they particularly love about the house, you can put that in there. If you see something that you know potential buyers will love, you can add that as well. If you can add it to your listing on the MLS, you can add it to your listing on the website, it's a particular file, you can basically direct people to this, from wherever they are, so they can do this virtual tour of your home. So that's one of our key recommendations that we think it just makes it easier, for buyers to get much more comfortable with the home. And if they decide, hey, I do want to see it. You can work with your seller to figure out okay, what are the parameters of that particular showing? How do we wanna handle that sellers gone one person, you know, we're gonna clean up afterwards, whatever it may be. But it gives buyers a chance to really get to know the home in a way that's better than just still photos before they decide to go and see it. So, the other thing is, you may not have the ability or or the desire to put together a 3D scan. But you can host a virtual brokers open or virtual tour just with video that you take. And so you can go through, you know, at the listing console and do a video, of the home that you can send to people, the other brokers, other clients, just whoever you think might be interested to give them again, a little bit more information about the home and how it flows, and how it all works. - I mean, this is something I think, you know, we've seen in San Francisco, they put a Shelter in Place Order in a matter of hours, and we've even seen customers starting to host their own video tours, and just a lot of demand coming in for this. - Yeah, and that's another thing is that you know, works great if you do this at the time of the console or right when you're getting ready to put the home on the market. You can have this do the video, have it saved, ready to go. But you can also have your seller host a home tour virtually. And like you can use FaceTime, you can use Google duo, different Skype, different types of platforms, that can host multiple people in a video call and just have the seller go through, and tour that buyer while you're on the line, the buyer's agents on the line and have that buyer have a chance to experience the home in a different way. I don't know how to do that, my, I did talk to my 21-year-old son, he assured me it can be done in Google it, and with each one of those different types of programs. And so we do think that this is a real viable option again, in a situation where you have a Shelter in Place Order, in place and no one's supposed to be going out and interacting with other people, or where you have a seller who just doesn't want other people in their home. The other thing is virtual staging. Like we use this now with most of our vacant listings and really liked it. You can see the difference it makes between an empty house and a virtually staged house, when someone's looking at it online. Roomy is the company that we use, but we think that there's some other ones out there as well. It's economical, it's about 30 to $60 a room. And it really can make a difference in how the home presents online. And you don't have to get a stager out there putting furniture in. And you don't have to have a stager out there getting furniture out again, like things can change quickly. This hasn't happened yet, but we're already talking about how to deal with it where you have a transaction it closes on time. And then between the closing and the time when the buyer needs to move in, a Shelter in Place Order comes out and the staging company is not removing furniture. You've got the buyer maybe the convinced, they are moving company to work and when you've got a house full of furniture that isn't anyone's and it could create a real issue. - Yeah, literally overnight, you can be in a situation where you can't move out or the other sellers can't move out because of a health change or an exposure. - And obviously, with virtual staging, you don't need to worry about any of that. And then the other thing is like, congrats, let's say you've put the home on the market, you got a seller who's had multiple offers, which is still happening. And you need to review those offers. But again, the seller doesn't want to actually meet in person. Programs like Zoom, Google Hangouts, are really great to use to present offers virtually, because not only can you do the video call, but you can also control and share documents. And so what this does is allows you to share the offers and basically page by page and you literally control where the documents at where the cursor is at. And so both of you and your client, you know, are on the same same page. You're not just describing things very verbally, right - In real time, you can really make sure they're focusing on the different terms and you can and I think one of the things about this time is, people need great advice more than ever because transactions are moving so quickly, and so able to really walk people through the terms of the offers are seeing is is obvious. - Right, and so we really do like these type programs that allow the video call with the document sharing. That it's almost as good as being in person to make sure that there is an understanding of each thing you're talking about. Okay, then there's just the kind of electronic signing, closing and mobile notary services. We use these now all the time. DocuSign for signing makes things so much easier, I think that is pretty widespread throughout the industry. Hopefully, you're you're using it as well, but if not I highly recommended it right now. Same with the closing finding lenders, title companies that are excited to host a closing is huge because it just makes things so much easier, particularly in this current environment, and say with mobile notary services. One of the things you may not have thought about, but what we are seeing again in Seattle and San Francisco is you can have a closing set up in a particular building. We all set go, it's fine the day before, and then someone with coronavirus was in the building the management, building management finds out and locks down the building. - Yeah, and we've this, this is like, I think the forefront of what we're seeing the coronavirus really impact as a deal, it's about to close, and all of a sudden it can't or it gets pushed because one of the parties can't get into a building. And we're seeing a ton of questions about this. - Yeah, and we've seen a lot of buildings close, like, we were tracking this, we're in about 80 plus markets, we've got a fair amount of buildings, and it is happening, you know, certainly not everywhere yet. But we are seeing it more and more and so don't assume because something's okay today, that it's going to be okay tomorrow. But do kind of follow up. We'll talk a little bit more about this in a moment with your notary, whoever, the signing agent and everyone on board to make sure they're flexible in the event that you know, you can't go to the closing at the date, time or location that you thought. All right now, social distancing, basically how do we keep a deal on track-- - A new phrase that's entered world. - Yeah, exactly, I think we're all familiar with it now. So you know, your client's home was on the market, you got an under contract, how do you keep it on track? Well, a lot of this is what we were just talking about with the kind of building closing. But here, you want to stay in touch with every one of the vendors or the people who are involved in the transaction. And to make sure that they are going to do things on time, and there's no particular issues. You wanna if you're representing the seller, make sure that they're comfortable having an inspector come into the home, if not, you wanna know about that early and try and figure out how you navigate that issue with the buyer and the buyer's agent. The appraiser that they're willing to go out and do things that the lenders that you know, the lenders all working from home, that they're on track and can close the loan on time and that movers are still going to be wanting to come and either move furniture in or out. And so we just think you're going to wanna be in contact with these people, on a very regular basis. And particularly as anything changes in your particular location. - Yeah, I think we're seeing a lot of change here to where title companies are getting more creative about if they can't do an in person title search, coming up with other ways to get deals across the line. And so I think this is just a key piece where coaching sort of in keeping every party to get things moving, going is just critical. And it's changing, you know, minute to minute, literally, who can, you know, help close deals? - Yeah, one of the things I actually heard about recently was that we had a notary, who had to notarize the different clients signing documents, but they couldn't actually leave the house and no one could leave. And so what they decided to do was, do a Skype call, notary watch the customer, the client, sign the documents, and then like document by document, here's the document, I signed it, and then they put them all together, mail them to the notary, notary read, notarize them mail them to the bank. And so, like Anthony said, like, there's ways to get creative, and you would figure this out regardless, I'm sure, like we're a creative group of people in the industry. But just like it's good to think about these things ahead of time again because it can decrease everyone's stress level. And I mean real estate stressful for our customers and clients even without the coronavirus you add this on top can get pretty crazy. All right now this is really where Anthony gets a chance to shine. - Yeah, I mean, I think this is you know, we're seeing MLSs and brokerages and realtor associations put out new COVID addendum. This is obviously moving very quickly. We've we've sort of put in place and recommend sort of two different types of addendum. Addendum one is really dealing with a contract, that's where you already pending. So you've got, you know, you've got a post mutual deal. But all of a sudden, the appraiser can't come to make sure the financing gets through. Inspector can't come to clear an inspection contingency. So we're recommending basically an addendum that puts everything on pause, until, until things go back to normal hopefully here shortly, and that deals able to go forward. So that's sort of the scenario we're recommending, for when deals are already chole - Got it. - We are seeing some addendum where people are being really prescriptive about washing hands or cleaning things. You know, we're, I don't wanna give legal advice to the entire world. But I think that's a dangerous road to go down just because things are changing so quickly about what, you know, public health officials are recommending. So that's sort of not the direction we're going. - Yeah, and I changed the slide too quickly. I'm gonna go back, because now I think we've got a different addendum for deals that are not under contract - Yeah, right, so and I think the other thing is really getting ahead of you know, in Seattle, we've sort of been dealing with this now for a couple weeks San Francisco, New York's getting there. But you know, for new deals coming together, we're also putting out an addendum that basically says, hey, you know, the world might be working fine where we are now and you know, title companies and county recording offices are sort of operating as usual. But putting a demo in place will put things on pause if that changes. And then the goal is really a to facilitate a conversation with your buyer or seller that hey, you know, the world could change quickly. I mean this is a way to give people flexibility to keep deals together. While you know the world is changing so fast. - Yeah, and that, again, that's one of our main points, which is like add these addendum when you don't think you need them. Because it's way easier to put this in now, when your location is not underneath particular orders and get agreement on it. So that you're set in the event, something happens, then it is when you know two weeks later, when the deals under contract, things are going what you think of smoothly, and then an order comes to Shelter in Place. And you've got a much different situation, with stress levels much higher all the way around, where you're trying to negotiate this addendum. And so frankly, like I would include this pretty much across the board and every contract. - Yeah, I mean, we're certainly it's yeah, it's a conversation to have with your with your, with your clients, but definitely the you know, using something like this is a key way to have that conversation. - Yep, now what happens if you're on the other side? - Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, we are seeing this like I mentioned before, where a lot of you know, we're seeing a lot of other brokerages you know, produce a addendum or MLSs. And so I think generally we'd say, if you see a form from an MLS or an association, obviously walk your clients through what the, what the sort of terms of that contract are recommending, I think we're seeing something from a brokerage. Just remember, you know, we don't really know how these things are gonna operate, tell your client either work with your broker to understand it, or probably better get a lawyer. I mean, remember, these things can be negotiated too. So just be be cautious, 'cause I think a lot of people are moving quickly putting new paperwork out there. And you know, we don't really know how it's gonna work, so. - Yeah, all right. - Yeah, so this is something and we've, I think we've covered this when we're starting to see a lot of places, particularly on the West Coast here, where maybe county recording offices are closing our appraisals can't happen. And so we're just really actively monitoring for our own business and understanding where that's happening. I think the good news is so far, we're not seeing any places where deals can't close. And we're seeing a lot of really creative solutions from all the various parties, you know, involved in closing transactions, but we are starting to see some news that we might see slowdowns in Boston where, you know, they have in person closings here in Seattle and San Francisco, which are obviously sort of have been more early on the impact of of the virus. - Yeah, and it I mean, I think the industry is doing a good job and the industry, all of us, and all of you as individuals trying to make things work for clients, for each other. And so but it is another situation where like, you would wanna check ahead of time and you know, before the day of closing, just to make sure that what is going on with your particular location in terms of the ability to file on time, et cetera. - And here, we're seeing again, you know, minute by minute sort of updates to whether a courthouse might be closed or what have you. - Yep, all right. And then like, this is one that I think you're probably already doing. But I mentioned before real estate stressful for every person who's going through it buying or selling a home and add the coronavirus and different kind of government orders to it and that stress level continues to go up. And so just get closer to your client. Let them know what's going on like in, like, no news is not good news. No news is bad news. Like you want to let them know even if there's nothing going on and everything's on track. That's a great call to receive if you're a client like great that's fantastic keep me in the loop let me know what you're hearing. - Well, I think even setting aside, getting deals done I mean, we're you know, here where we are you know, you haven't you haven't seen each other face to face in weeks. I mean, there's just an element of well being of connection and reaching out you know, you're I think your clients are looking for you beyond just real estate advice, but that connection and just keeping that going as the world really changes rapidly, and learn how to deal with it. - Yeah, it's first time I've been within six feet or Anthony in longtime, and we're only here 'cause the like this type-- - We couldn't quite figure out another way to do it. - But, but yeah, it's been a virtual world and so like, pick up the phone. All right, the other thing is not about necessarily your clients, but it's about you, and working as a team. And when this started about 10 days ago, you know the different levels of leadership here at Redfin, really started to come together and decide we need to be in touch. And we need to over communicate. So we put together a stand up every morning 9 a.m. And it is a meeting where we all get together virtually online and go, okay, what's going on? What are the hot topics? What what has changed since yesterday? This, this whole situation moves fast. And so we're literally on the line every day what has changed since yesterday? And then try and figure out how do we want to either take advantage of that? How do we resolve it? What communication do we wanna put out? And that way, we're all on the same page, we're answering things consistently. And we're answering things quickly. You're not trying to figure out kinda of get everyone together. What are they doing? How are they doing it? We just know everyday 9 a.m there's going to be a stand up and if there's nothing to talk about, we don't waste the time we don't feel the space. We hang up after three minutes. - How many times has that happened? - Like last week, it hasn't happened at all that we used to have it for half an hour and now we have it for an hour. You know, like I said, we're in eighty locations and there's different things going on, throughout and your situation may be different. And that's fine. But there's still different things going on throughout a particular city, or location. And so it's just been really useful to stay on top of it and to figure out how what response we're providing to things and to make sure it's consistent, and everyone's on track with the same message. And it's also really helped us be proactive and to get ahead of this, to anticipate problems. We've been doing exactly what I've been talking about with you, which is, oh, we see a situation arise in one city, that's probably gonna happen throughout the country, it's just seven to 10 days behind. And so we're communicating that to all of our agents, all of our managers in each one of those locations to let them know here's what's going on. It also helps because it makes people feel connected. And so you know, the slide says like, no one should feel like an island. This can be an isolating time. Now most of you probably are used to working from home. It's one of the great things about this industry. So it's like awesome ahead of the game. But if you haven't been in a city where things are shut down, is a little different, like, you're not meeting customers at Starbucks, you're not going to the gym, you're not meeting someone for lunch, the restaurants are closed, Starbucks closed, the gyms closed, everything is closed. And so you don't have those interactions anymore. And so even if you don't have a team, I would create one. Like, you've got peers that, you know, in your city, you have peers, you know, in other cities, and to get that kinda of stand up together just to go, what are you hearing? How are you? How did what situations came up? Here's what happened with me, here's how we dealt with it. That's incredibly useful. You know, maybe you don't need to meet every day. Maybe it's every second day, every third day. But we still think it can be incredibly valuable to get together with peers and to just share experiences and how you overcame challenges, because it's great to be ahead of that, to be able to tell a client oh, yeah, yeah, I have thought about this, this is how we're gonna handle it, I got this, so. - Yeah, and I think I mean, also, it's just things are changing so rapidly, that it's just it's almost invaluable. Your mind can't sort of process everything quickly and without that team to bounce things off and change decisions when sometimes three days later feels like a totally the right world, that you were in before. - Exactly yeah, what was a great idea three days ago, it's now obsolete-- - A terrible idea, yeah, right. - All right, and then the other thing is if you have downtime, we're certainly telling all our, all of our agents this like, like, let's really improve your skills, you know, any continuing education needs to take care of, great time to do it. If you have particular template to use for different situations, to make them better, you know, you're still gonna want to personalize them. But you can go through all the documents you use, how you use them, and just kind of do some spring cleaning, to take advantage of time that otherwise might be idle. - Might be idle. - Yeah, and then the last thing we wanted to talk about was some ways that I think we might have some members of different MLSs on online. If not, we'll probably talk to them about this later, but just some suggestion we have that, I know we have Redfin one, but I think they're be useful for actually everybody. And the first thing is we talked about virtual tours. And some MLSs has have a spot a field where you can upload those others do not, we think it'd be awesome if every MLS had that ability to be able to add a virtual tour to the listing, and make it easy for anyone to go and see and walk through that virtual tour. And then the other thing is, we'd love to have a checkbox where a listing agent or seller can agree to allow an agent to come through and do a recording and share that recording with their customer, or with multiple customers. And we understand their safety concerns there, which is why there'd be a checkbox and maybe that most sellers wouldn't want to allow that. And that's fine. But there may be sellers like the investors, vacant homes where they're like, sure, like I have no problem with you doing a tour like that. And it just makes it easier for that to happen. - Yeah, I mean, this is an area where I mean you know, we're hoping for them losses really to move to move quickly and actually, you know, promote safety if there's more ability to see few homes in different ways. You know, I think, you know, one of the stories that I think is gonna emerge from this as people still wanna move, so buy and sell homes. And so we need to be, I think, as creative and as move as quickly as we can and make that possible. - Right, exactly, the second item and something Anthony mentioned, which is basically the update forms with the COVID-19 addendum. You know we have those addendums, we've provided those addendums to all our agents. And I know some other brokerages are doing this too. But it's like it's awesome when an MLS can go ahead and create a form for it, because then everyone knows it. Everyone's comfortable with it. There's less negotiations back and forth. And so if you're a member of an MLS who hasn't yet created one of these forms to help kind of extend the closing date, when things get kind of pushed back or COVID-19 complicates things, that would be a great way to help all of your members. - Yeah, I mean, I think just kind of one here thing, here's one of the I think one of the amazing things about this is industry is how built on cooperation is and I know brokers across I mean, we're seeing questions. We're asking questions about workers across the country of, how do I deal with these shutdown orders? what's safe, what's not? I think really seeing the MLS is kind of lead here would be incredibly would be fantastic, yeah. - And then the last thing, this varies by MLS as well, but because in person tours can be less frequent or just not even allowed by government order, you know, allowing as many photos as possible, like, hopefully at least 50, where you can just get a better sense of the home, you know, and obviously, you don't have to use them if there's not anything there. It's a smaller home, but to allow that to have buyers who are online get a better idea of the home. All right, I think that is it other than questions? - Questions, all right. Yeah, let's bring them on. First question. What should agents do if they find out they have COVID-19 or were exposed to it? - Yeah, I mean, I think this is a straightforward one. I think this is where you know, we've already built the ability of you know, we haven't been in the situation but know who you met with, know not only the customers you've been with, but you know, homes you've been in, other people you've been in contact with them and reach out. I mean, it's just yeah, hopefully that's common sense. - Yeah, exactly, like I would self quarantine and then talk to a doctor about, you know, what and how you should do from there, yeah. Do you think prices of homes will get lower? If so by how much? This is one where I wish you know, I have my crystal ball. If I really knew the answer to this one, I would be incredibly popular, with all the news outlets. Personally, I think prices like we haven't seen a lot of price drops. There are still multiple offers-- - We're still seeing things going pending and yeah-- - Oh, yeah, and we're still seeing some very busy open houses. I know, one of our agents in New Jersey was recently had clients go to open house, and they had limited the open house to one buying group at a time, and but there were six buying groups in line like a Disneyland ride, like Glenn mentioned in this blog, waiting to get in. And so there are still things going on. I think if present trends continue and demand, we're seeing demand start with still a lot of demand with people writing offers, less website traffic and less people kind of earlier in the funnel. So if that continues, then I think prices likely will get lower, but we don't know by how much right now. Okay, mobile notary legislation is popping up around the country, but some support for these bills has been spotty discrepancy, more widespread support for mobile notary bills after this. Yeah, I hope so. Yeah, we do think we've kind of touched on this earlier. But we do think that this is going to help with that. I mean that's a great thing, that more closings across the board would be fantastic, and easier for everybody involved in the industry. Okay, it's clear open houses and groups showings should have ceased last week at the latest. But what about individual showings? It's continuing the spread of COVID and putting agents, consumers at risk, so-- - Yeah, I mean, this is when we don't try and act quickly and you know, we've shut down open houses basically across the country, you know, we're obviously being really careful about following the Shelter in Place Orders where they exist. I mean, and we really think you know, absolutely, that the first priority is gotta be keeping people safe. - Yeah, same time we do think individual showings can be done in a safe manner where, you know, it is just one agent, one client walking in, keeping their distance. And, you know, seller understanding, well, they're going to be opening doors and closing doors and cleaning off the doorknobs et cetera, if they need to, but other than that, at the moment, outside of places that have a Shelter in Place Order, we're still doing that. Okay, last question. What do you guys seen in terms of showing activity, new contract volume and percent of contracts terminated in Seattle over the last 30 days versus normalized volume? So I mentioned this a little bit just before I you know, I don't have the numbers for Seattle specifically, but we have been wrote in a blog post yesterday, that demand overall and I'm going from memory here, so like, you can go to the blog that is up on our website to get the specifics. But basically January and February is around 27% above last year, and then the last like, basically seven days at has gone down to close to I think 1% above last year. And so that has decreased, really kind of people starting to tour, people starting to go on multiple tours, that part has definitely slowed down. The offer writing the people who are still involved in the market, like they're serious. Yeah, it is going on, you know, not as strong as it was by any means. But we're like I said, we're still seeing multiple offers, and we're still seeing a lot of things go under contract in Seattle and elsewhere. So you know, I think if things continue on their present course demand is gonna continue to decrease. Certainly for the next, I think the rest of March and I'd be surprised if April wasn't seriously impacted as well. But we really don't know what's gonna happen after that. Anything to add? - Nope. - All right, well, thanks everyone for your time and attention. And for the questions, we appreciate it. Hopefully this was helpful and good luck, stay healthy.
	5 years ago	Post 1 • IP flag post

Redfin: What We’ve Learned So Far Running a Brokerage During a Pandemic11264