Selling a property with forward bookings

[Christine Kenyon]

We've just put one of our properties on the market and it has sold extremely quickly (estate agents got the keys on Friday; someone viewed it on Sunday and we agreed the sale on Monday). We're not complaining, but it means we have got at least six weeks of bookings after sale completion which the new owners plan to honour.

Two questions:

1. What has anyone else done about payment for the forward bookings? We don't expect the full payment, but would like some payment for the marketing/admin, etc. What have you done in a similar situation?

2. One of the bookings is a regular booking whom we don't want to lose. Any suggestions on how to keep them for future bookings?

[vrooje]

Christine,

Were I in your position, I would probably think of myself as a manager for those six bookings -- and charge a manager's fee for them. I'm not exactly sure what that fee would be -- 20%? More?

I would also want to be the one dealing with all of these clients, so that they would never suspect I had sold the house at all. That seems like the professional thing to do, and after following up with each client I would have the opportunity to tell them that I had sold the cottage and that next year they'd be welcome back at my other properties.

My guess would be that unless your buyers are already experienced rental owners, they are a little nervous about handling bookings and would actually prefer for you to deal with the ones that already exist, so you'd be doing them (and you) a favor.

Cheers!

[Christine Kenyon]

Thanks for the feedback, Brooke. Excellent advice as ever! Maybe you do rule 4ever - see cafe quote!

[vrooje]

Oh, goodness, no -- I was making fun of myself!

Well, okay, myself and all those teenyboppers who contract words into strange combinations of letters, numbers and symbols.

"did u c what Sam did @ Mike's??? That was l33t!"

Definitely drives me crazy.

Teehee -- but I'm waiting to see what reddevil says. After all, he apparently said such nice things about me!

Oh, and I forgot to say congratulations on such a quick sale of your home! The market in the US has gone soft pretty fast -- houses that would have sold in days before are now taking months.

[Christine Kenyon]

Hello again. This is feedback for Brooke on what happened with our sale. As ever, your advice was extremely helpful - thank you! In the end we provided all the relevant info to the new owners and wrote to the people who had effectively booked through us to let them know what was happening. So in effect we handed the bookings over.


End result: we've heard nothing from the folk we wrote to so we assume that they are happy (but we will be making contact again in the new year); the new owners have done a superb job with the website (just wish we'd done what they've done!) and they seem to be really enjoying being owners of a holiday cottage. We're in regular contact.

The other side of the coin is that we're in the throes of buying another cottage and we seem to have encountered the vendor from the hell and have ended up doing up all the above as buyers rather than sellers ! The morale is, I expect, it depends who you're buying from!

[vrooje]

Thanks for the feedback!

And good luck with the cottage purchase!