House showings

We've had the house listed for less than 2 weeks, and we've had 3 showings so far. It's been 7 years since we sold our previous house so I was a bit out of touch with the whole real estate market. When we sold our previous house, we didn't have Snoopy, so there were no issues if somebody wanted to come see the house. We just kept it clean and tidy and we could show it at a moment's notice. This time, we do have a dog that I need to pick up before every showing. It's really not a huge deal as I only work 5 minutes from my house. I have to say, I was expecting that we would be getting a bit more notice about showing our house.

For our first showing, our realtor called me with 5 hours notice. That was fine. I had all kinds of time to grab the dog and do a quick run through with the vacuum, etc.

The second showing was during a snowstorm, so I had actually written the day off for house showings since I didn't think that anybody would be out on the roads that day. We had less than 2 hours to get ready for that particular showing. Fortunately it was a Sunday so as soon as we heard about it, Clay went outside to plow the driveway while I shovelled the walkways and did the same run-through as during the previous showing. We managed to leave with half an hour to spare.

As I posted yesterday, we had an snow/ice storm late into Wednesday night and our power was out from midnight on. I was in town and away from my office (i.e. further away from home) when I got a phone call from my dad telling me to return a call to my realtor. I called her back and was told that somebody wanted to look at our house in 45 minutes. I told her that our power was out so it might not show very well, not to mention that the yard was a mess after the storm with tree limbs down and one tree flowered open into our driveway. She told me that it was a military couple being transferred to our area and they had to buy a house within the next 2 days since the storm had already shortened their house hunting time. I jumped in the car and drove home as quickly as I could considering the awful road conditions. It took me 10 minutes longer than it normally would have on good roads, so now I only had 20 minutes to tidy up and with no water or electricity available to me, it was definitely a challenge. I'm not sure when they arrived, but we never heard anything back in terms of an offer.

The notice we've been given has been getting progressively shorter. Forty-five minutes is about as short as I can go. I want to sell my house and be available for showings, but yesterday was a bit ridiculous. Probably if we had gotten an offer, I wouldn't be so frustrated about it today.