“You could see, 20 years from now this will all be done on the internet.”
In November 2018, ShowingTime president Michael Lane spoke with Greg Robertson of Vendor Alley during Robertson’s Listing Bits podcast to discuss how ShowingTime came to be and how it has evolved to meet the needs of clients. The whole interview is well worth a listen and can be accessed by clicking here. We’ve also provided a few excerpts from the interview, shared below.
On what inspires ShowingTime to develop new services:
“[New services come] almost always at the recommendation of a loyal client who loves what we do and has said, ‘You know, you guys ought to think about doing this and this other thing because they’re related to your core business.’ So we attend a lot of events and we spent a lot of time listening to clients about what they like, what they don’t like and what they think we ought to get in to.”
On the ShowingTime Showing Index:
“The key thing for us is that when people use the ShowingTime Appointment Center or our Front Desk software, virtually all of the appointments on all of their listings are flowing through those products. So, about six years ago we started thinking, ‘You know, this [Showing Index] would be a cool thing to do.’ But to build the index, you had to have a lot of really statistically significant data.
“So, we started measuring the number of showings that were happening in a given month versus the number of homes that could be shown in that month, and how that ratio changes over and over based on where it is in the country and based on other metrics.
“Historically, people have looked at homes that have sold in an area as an indicator of how things are going. [Before the introduction of the Showing Index] there just wasn’t good [forward-looking] information as to what was going on. You’d look for what other homes sold recently, what did they sell for and so on. But there weren’t really good forward-looking indicators. But showing activity, if you think about it, is a highly forward-looking indicator because showings represent the presence of buyers.”
On developing solutions for every need:
“Real estate is like the ultimate entrepreneurial business, but the challenge that creates for us is, just about everybody wants to [do it] a little bit differently. There’s not one silver bullet that works for everybody. You’ve got different business models, different markets, different practices, brokers versus agents — we have a full team of people [working on] that and nothing else.”
Find out how ShowingTime can remove the burden of managing showings and handling daily business needs. Reach out to our sales team by clicking the button below to learn about ShowingTime solutions, including our newest service, ShowingTime Live Connect.