Landlord selling property showings protocol

[Dan Pritchard]

This is mostly out of curiosity. Currently we are in a rental buying a house next month. We sold our house and moved last year into current rental. Current house the owners put on the market and offered $200 off of $2800 rent for our inconvenience. I said we’d do our best but with 3 kids and packing for our own move would be fairly limited in how often we’d be able to show it. It hasn’t turned into an inconvenience due to them listing quite a bit over what the market suggests it’s worth. Only two showings in five days. And this is a smoking hot market. We’ve been trying to buy for a year and have plenty of assets income etc so I know this area pretty well. Thinking about when we sold our own house it was way more than a $200 inconvinence to me based on how I value my time if we’d had ten showings the first weekend. What do you all typically do when trying to sell a property with renters currently in it? It should be noted they also could have just waited a month for us to be out and then they could have put some work into the place and maybe gotten a price closer to what they’re hoping.

[Theresa Harris]

They listed the house you are renting, but presumably realtors are doing the showings.  You should not be doing the showings.  You do need to make the house available for showings  with proper notice and if possible be out of the house-hard to do with 3 kids, but you can go and play in the backyard.  $200 is a nice offer from the landlord for the inconvenience when realtors do the showings.

Depending on location, waiting a month and then doing renos, may put the finished house on the market too late for the summer buyers.