Here’s something I had never heard before Monday night:

“You have………sixteen new voice messages.”

While I was momentarily reminded of a scene from Zoolander, I couldn’t help but realize the “little more than normal” number of messages just underscored how helpless 10,500,000 of us Canadians were on Monday.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, then you must be one of those weirdos on Wind, or Koodo.  I had never met anybody on those networks before Monday, nor did I know that my mother was on Telus.

One of two conclusions can be drawn from Monday’s experience:

1. Rogers is too large and has too big an impact on our lives and must be broken up.
2. Rogers is too large and has too big an impact on our lives and we should all know that we are lowly peons that can be chewed up and spit out by this giant, and therefore should bow down.

I, for one, never want to offend Rogers.  I’m going to stay on their good side from now on…

As you can imagine, it’s pretty difficult to transact in real estate without the use of the phone, not to mention wireless access ANYWHERE in the city.

I awoke on Monday morning, not knowing that anything was wrong.  My phone showed new text messages and new emails, and it wasn’t until I pulled out of my driveway, and my phone rang until I knew what was up.

“The world is falling apart!” Chris said, as soon as I answered.

“You mean, like, in general?  Like this ‘good morning’ is brought to me by daily ramblings about pandemic lockdowns, crazy families, and the other topics we discuss daily?”

“No, I mean……..wait, yes, but also, Rogers is down.  I tried calling you like four times but it’s going to voicemail,” Chris said.

“But we’re talking now,” I told him.  “And I’m getting messages on my phone.”

“Yeah, sure,” he replied.  “But you won’t get another message on your phone until you get to the office and close to a hard-lined wireless network.”

We bantered about kids, wives, and coffee for a few minutes, and then I arrived at Bosley and went to my office.

A few minutes later, the phone rang, and it was Matthew – my millennial teammate.  Except he wasn’t calling me, he was FaceTiming me!

With a great view of the ceiling of Matthew’s condo, he urged, “I strongly suggest you move your offer date to tomorrow,” as he did without traditional pleasantries.

“Why are you FaceTiming me?” I asked.

“Because wireless networks are down,” he said.

I told him that Chris had just called me, and he said, “Chris is on Bell.  You can receive an incoming call from a Bell subscriber but not Rogers, and you can’t make any outgoing calls.”

I immediately hung up on him, tried calling him back, but nothing happened.

Then I FaceTimed him.

“You have to move your offer date,” he told me.  “Nobody on Rogers can communicate today; not in the traditional fashion,” he said.

I spent the next hour looking into methods of communication like it was a Grade Nine project.

We could FaceTime Audio, or FaceTime Video.  We could use WhatsApp.  We could call landlines.  We could email.

It seemed okay, but as I have written on many occasions before, I just don’t trust that today’s buyer-agent pool is capable enough of facing adversity head-on, and I didn’t want to take any chances.

So I moved my offer date to Tuesday night, updated agents through BrokerBay, and updated the listing.

What a day, right?

The entire experience was eye-opening, at least from a sense that we’ve become so accustomed as well as addicted to the immediacy that advances in technology have provided that we become absolutely helpless without it.

Thirty years ago, real estate agents had no cell phones, they had no Internet, there was no MLS, and they had to use rotary-dial phones, sitting on their desks, to call other agents at their desks.

Thirty years ago, real estate agents would walk into the office and their secretary would hand them a stack of pink sheets, each with a message on it.

“Any messages, Suzanne?” the agent would ask as he came inside and hung up his trench coat, placed his fedora on a hat rack, and then possibly light a fresh cigarette.

Alright, maybe I’m a decade ahead, but you get the idea.

Really, really eye-opening stuff this week, I must say.

After Monday’s discussion about the market moving forward in a pandemic, I thought it would be a good opportunity to write about something I don’t believe we’ve discussed before, namely, expectations.

Not expectations in terms of the overall market, or the market in a stay-at-home order, but rather what to expect, as a seller, as soon as your house or condo is listed for sale.

I realize that many sellers are, in fact, first-time sellers.  Then again, many sellers have sold before, but not in a market as hot as this one.

My clients will generally start asking me questions before I’ve even had the opportunity to walk them through the process and this is partly borne of anxiety, but partly due to the lack of experience.

When will showings start?

How many showings should you expect?

How many offers should you expect?

What price should you expect?

Then sometimes the question I get is: how many questions should we expect, and what type?

Clients will ask if they should come by and check on the house, or take the outdoor cushions inside at night, or turn the lights on and off each day and night.  This assumes, of course, that they’ve moved out of the house, which just about everybody does during the pandemic.

The night before I list a property for sale, I always call the sellers to walk them through the process.

The listing will go onto MLS around 9:30am.

Showings can start at any time, but we don’t know when the first one will be booked, or when it will take place.

I usually tell them to expect a couple of go-getters who book viewings right away.  Since so many properties are selling via bully offers in this market, especially freehold properties, you’ll always see two or three agents who book in the first hour, often for that afternoon or that evening, either to protect against losing to a bully offer or to give themselves the opportunity to submit the bully.

How many showings is another question altogether, and the answer will vary depending on the property price, type, location, and pricing strategy.  What do I mean by pricing strategy?  Well, 1-bed, 1-bath condos can get 50, 60, or 70 showings, and can get 5, 10, or 15 offers.  But if you price a $600,000 condo at $649,900, you’re not going to get the same number of showings or offers as you would if you priced the property at $499,900.

I will do my best to accurately predict how many showings we would have on a given property and then set that as an expectation for the sellers.

Case in point: I listed a property in Bloor West Village today.

I told the sellers on Monday night that I would expect to have a minimum of 30 showings on the property, but that 40 would be great.  Seeing 50 showings would blow away expectations.

I further added that we’re probably going to see 5-8 showings booked on the first day.  That’s booked, and not through the house, since an agent might book on Tuesday for a viewing on Wednesday night or even the weekend.  We would like to see 8-10 showings booked on the second day, since that’s usually the busiest day.  Why?  Well, consider that on the day the listing comes out, agents will email the listing to their clients, the clients will take some time to look it over, and then they’ll figure out a time to go check it out.  This means that the second day of the listing is when most agents will book.

Now, how about the number of offers to expect?

That’s the million-dollar question.

Again, it may depend on your pricing strategy.  But every time you think you’ve got some sort of rule-of-thumb or predictability model, it only takes one listing for all that to go out the window.

Once you predict, estimate, or provide any measure of expectations on the number of showings, the next metric is how many agents ask for a copy of the home inspection (for a house) or a copy of the status certificate (for a condo).

Earlier this month, I had two listings for 1-bed, 1-bath condominiums with the following metrics:

Property #1:
List price: $499,900
Number of Showings: 88
Number of agents asking for the status certificate: 21

Property #2:
List price: $499,900
Number of Showings: 102
Number of agents asking for the status certificate: 18

First of all, can you get a load of those showings?

Imagine 102 showings on a 1-bed, 1-bath condo?

So if we’re looking for metrics here, we can see that 24.8% of agents showing the first property asked for a copy of the status certificate, and 17.6% of agents showing the second property asked for a copy of the status certificate.

How many offers materialized?

Property #1: 19
Property #2: 11

So the first property saw an “offer percentage” of 21.6%, ie. 19 offers on 88 showings, and a whopping 19/21 ratio of offers to status certificate requests, or 90.5%.

Obviously, not all of the 19 agents who submitted offers were included in the 21 that asked for a copy of the status certificate, but I’m looking at the ratio here.

On the second property, we saw an offer percentage of 10.7%, which is less than half of the first property.  So if you’re looking for some continuity, we didn’t find it here!  The ratio of offers to status requests was 11/18, or 61.1%.

Now how about a condo townhouse?

List price: $879,900
Number of showings: 66
Number of agents asking for the status certificate: 17

How many offers in the end?

9

So here we see 25.8% of agents who showed the property asking for a copy of the status certificate, which is in line with property #1 above.  And we see an offer percentage of 13.6%, which is in between the 21.6% and 10.7% in the two examples above.  The offer/ask ratio was 9/17, or 52.9%.

Does it feel like we’re starting to see a range?

Let’s go back to another condo, just to flush this out.

List price: $699,900
Number of showings: 56
Number of agents asking for the status certificate: 15

Here we have 26.7% of agents who showed the property asking for the status certificate, which gives us the following four data points:

24.8%
17.6%
25.8%
26.7%

Save for that one data point, our set is fairly aligned.  But again, we’re not seeing 8% and we’re not seeing 40%.  I think we have a pretty good idea of how to use this metric.

Now, how many agents submitted offers on this property?

12

So our offer percentage is 21.4%.

Our four data points:

21.6%
10.7%
13.6%
21.4%

Our “offer percentage” isn’t quite as congruent as our “percentage of agents asking for a copy of the status,” but again, it’s not completely out of whack.

What is out whack?

Here’s an example…

Earlier this year, I had an incredible house for sale on the east side which generated a whopping 71 showings.

I was ready for a windfall.  I think the sellers were too.

We had 19 agents ask for a copy of the home inspection.

So, if we’re using “requests for status” and “requests for inspection” interchangeably, for condos and houses respectively, our “ask percentage” is 26.8%, which is in line with the stats above: 24.8%, 17.6%, 25.8%, 26.7%.

However, with 71 showings and 19 requests for the home inspection, guess how many offers we ended up with?

2

That’s an offer percentage of 2.8%.

It’s an offer/ask ratio of 2/19, or 10.5%.

We ended up selling for almost $200,000 over the list price, and we surged past our “floor,” but the sellers and I were both quite perplexed.  This house had a really odd basement and that was noted by over twenty agents that I spoke to on offer night as I tried to drum up interest and solicit feedback, but this property shows that you can’t count your chickens before they hatch.

Here’s another recent house sale:

List price: $1,199,000
Number of showings: 61
Number of agents asking for home inspection: 16
Number of offers: 6

Here we have an “offer percentage” of 9.8%, an “ask percentage” of 26.2%, and an offer/ask percentage of 6/16, or 37.5%.

How about a very recent one?

A townhouse listing from this week:

List Price: $899,900
Number of showings: 58
Number of agents asking for status certificate: 16
Number of offers: 10

So we have an “offer percentage” of 17.2%, an “ask percentage” of 27.6%, and an offer/ask ratio of 10/16, or 62.5%.

So let’s summarize the data set:

The percentage of showings for which agents ask for a copy of the inspection or status certificate, which I might rename the “interest quotient,” is as follows:

24.8% (condo)
17.6% (condo)
25.8% (condo townhouse)
26.7% (condo)
26.8% (house)
26.2% (house)
27.6% (condo townhouse)

We can choose to look at this as the percentage of showings for which we have a serious or interested buyer.

Not all of these buyers will submit offers, but it looks like a quarter of all showings will turn into serious interest.

Next, we have the simple percentage of showings that turned into offers, or the “offer percentage” as follows:

21.6% (condo)
10.7% (condo)
13.6% (condo townhouse)
21.4% (condo)
2.8% (house)
9.8% (house)
17.2% (condo townhouse)

There’s far more volatility in this figure, and even though we have two single-digit figures, I do believe we can form expectations based on this figure.

Lastly, if we look at the ratio of offers submitted to the “interested buyers,” ie. those asking for a copy of the inspection or status certificate, I think we can try to put all this together:

90.5% (condo)
61.1% (condo)
52.9% (condo townhouse)
80.0% (condo)
10.5% (house)
37.5% (house)
62.5% (condo townhouse)

These percentages clearly demonstrate that you’re going to have a far higher ratio of agents submitting offers to agents expressing interest for condos than you would for houses, and that makes sense, considering how much more of a commitment it is to drop $1,600,000 on a house than $605,000 on a condo.

Some of you will find zero predictability in the above figures, and others will see commonalities and can perhaps set expectations on your own house or condo sale accordingly.

I think it goes without saying that the more showings you have, the more interested buyers you will have (maybe not as a percentage), but also the more offers you’ll have.  This is why agents price low and hold back offers, in case that wasn’t obvious already.

As for the the Bloor West Village property that I listed today, for which I told the sellers, “I would like to see 5-8 showings on the first day,” well, we finished today with nine, so we’re slightly ahead of the game.  We’ve also had 5 agents ask for a copy of the home inspection; two that showed today, and three that are looking ahead to showings this week – only one of which has booked so far.

Phew!  Confused with all those numbers?

Did you skip past it?  Even after skipping past the folksy intro?

Well, I assure you, the prospective sellers out there are taking it all in!

You can’t have expectations if you have absolutely zero idea what to expect…