New South Count Broker Open House Tour Process

We want to share the work of the South County Tour of Homes Task Force for a great job coming up with a collective solution to low attendance at Tuesday morning broker open houses.  Here is they’re report, as submitted by Kim Wilder of Barnbrook Reealty (Maureen Kirkby White, Chair). Kudos to all who participated!

During a very productive meeting of the South County Tour of Homes Task Force many wonderful ideas were passionately discussed. The one thing that everyone was in agreement about, we need a new plan. Agents are spending hours of their time and getting just a handful of other agents in to see their properties.  The plan, for now is to create a tour of such.

How will this work?

Hopefully well, but if not, there were a number of other ideas that would require a little deeper investigation and logistics, but for now, it is going to look like this. For now, we are still going to use the 3 town groupings, but if one is regularly, significantly more popular, and another is less so, then we might switch around the town groupings.

If you don’t know how to find which towns are which dates, here are some easy instructions.

  1. FLEXMLS > DAILY FUNCTIONS > BULLETIN BOARD > SOUTH COUNCIL BROKER TOURS > SOUTH COUNTY TOUR OF HOMES SCHEDULE
  2. OR  On the FlexMLS Homepage, under the links box, item #1 is South County Tour of Homes
  3. Directly from the google map created for this years ago by Chapin Fish.

Save the link above for quick access or if you use google calendars, add this calendar to your options by clicking the +GoogleCalendar button in the bottom right corner.  You will see a calendar with the tour schedule that repeats every three weeks.

  1. Richmond, Stockbridge, West Stockbridge, Lenox & Lee
  2. Monterey, New Marlboro, Tyringham, Sandisfield, Otis, Becket
  3. Sheffield, Egremont, Mt. Washington, Alford, Great Barrington & Housatonic

As SOON as you know that you want to hold a tour, enterit in to Flex, leave the time as 9-11am, as this is going to change.

The Caravan Process:

    • The deadline to add a home for the tour is 4pm on Friday. But if there is a large number the houses will be taken on a first come, first serve basis, and the last entered will be left out.
    • Sometime before Monday at 11am, Kim Wilder from Barnbrook Realty, or another member of the task force will create a tour with 15-20 minute windows for the agents to view the homes and travel time calculated as well. Just as we do for buyer clients.  If your property has something unique that makes the viewing take a bit longer, please email Kim (Kim@barnbrookrealty.com) so that she can accommodate that in the scheduling of the tour.
    • All agents holding a tour will get an email with the exact time for their property to be open. Agents, please change the time in Flex to show the new time for your open house as soon as possible. This way agents can print the open house list on Monday afternoon and be ready to join the whole tour or as many as they can.
    • Call fellow agents, car pool if you want, but you won’t have to do any scheduling or route planning, so just enjoying visiting each other’s properties.