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Takeaways:
- Half of renters who book showings through Naked Apartments request day-of property visits.
- NYC real estate agents have embraced on-demand showings.
- Naked Apartments estimates that most on-demand showing requests made through Naked Apartments result in the prospective renter seeing multiple apartments with an agent.
Like it or not, consumers want showings on demand.
And real estate agents in New York City are rising to the challenge, according to a new study released by Naked Apartments.
Naked Apartments lets renters instantly book showings for about 14 percent of its listings. It estimates that consumers used its “Viewings on Demand” feature to schedule more than 3,000 showings in June.
About 55 percent of Viewings on Demand “result in the client seeing multiple apartments with the agent, not just the apartment they requested,” and 12 percent of “Instant Views” facilitated by Naked Apartments result in an “application/close,” said Naked Apartments CEO Joe Charat.
Nearly half of renters who use Naked Apartments to schedule showings requested immediate or day-of property visits, according to the analysis. Around 7 out of 10 booked showings within two days.
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Naked Apartments
New York City real estate agents are doing their damnedest to accommodate immediate showing requests.
When a renter requests a showing on Naked Apartments, Naked Apartments fires off the request to a number of real estate agents. The first to respond gets the lead.
Close to half of showing requests made through Naked Apartments are answered within five minutes, according to the site. About 7 out of 10 are answered with 30 minutes.
Only 2 in 10 don’t hear back within an hour.
Naked Apartments
Skeptics of showings-on-demand tools note that residents don’t want their dwellings available for visits from strangers at all hours, and there’s no way to instantly clear visits from strangers with residents.
Those obstacles are probably much more of an issue in the for-sale market. For-sale listings may be more likely to be occupied, and homeowners may not feel the same pressure as renters to host visits from their prospective replacements on short notice.
“Rentals lends itself to the on-demand concept much more so than sales,” Charat noted. “With rentals there are leasing offices, on-site supers with keys, multiple brokers with keys, model units, walk-in hours, and seeing one unit typically results in seeing multiple nearby units.”
But although many real estate agents working in sales may struggle to immediately confirm requested showings, that doesn’t mean consumers will eschew tools that offer the ability to immediately book showings.
As showings-on-demand tools proliferate, they are likely to generate many leads for agents — whether they are gimmicky or not. That’s probably not lost on other providers of on-demand showing services, including Redfin, Curb Call and AgentPair.
