San Francisco Association of Realtors Guidance during Shelter in Place
Excerpt of 3/18/20 email from SFAR President - Marc Dickow
Broker Tours — Suspended until April 7, 2020 (or the date the shelter in place order is lifted)
Mayor Breed's shelter in place order makes it very clear that this type of activity is not viewed as an "essential need". In compliance with the government-issued order, we are suspending Broker Tours until the order is lifted or the situation changes. At a minimum, this will mean no Broker Tours until April 7, 2020 (the last day of the current shelter in place order).
We are not modifying the Rapattoni MLS system; we simply require that our members refrain from putting listings “on tour” until further notice. The SFARMLS Operations Team may, at its discretion, delete entered tour data if this suspension is not followed. Since the shelter in place order is in effect across the entire Bay Area (including in Marin, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Contra Costa, Santa Cruz, and Alameda Counties and the City of Berkeley), expect this approach will apply to the MLSs in our service area.
Open Houses and Showings — Strongly not recommended until the SIP order is lifted.
The shelter in place order lists activities that are deemed "essential". Open houses and showings are types of activities not included in this list. Again, we cannot do more than advise you to comply with the shelter in place order. Once we hear from the city that the situation is improving, or has changed, we will respond accordingly and update our guidance.
Following the shelter in place order, SFAR’s recommendation is to refrain from personally showing houses in any capacity until the situation becomes clearer or the involved risks are reduced.
Managing Your Listings — Using Hold, Cancel, and virtual open houses. Bring back as “new” once the shelter in place order is lifted.
Last week we released an article regarding how to manage your listings and details about modifications we have made to the SFARMLS Rules & Regulations to accommodate these unprecedented circumstances. We completely understand that exceptions are going to be necessary. We would like to expand on and clarify those changes herein.
Hold Status (Off-Market)
If you placed your listing on Hold status on or after Monday March 9, 2020, we will allow you to email us a request to have that listing marked as “new” once the listing has been changed back to any Active status. Please note that the “new” status indicator will not change, or zero-out, or “reset” days on market (DOM). Using Hold will stop DOM from incrementing and take your listing off-market.
!! IMPORTANT !! We want to highlight that placing a listing on Hold will not stop all third-party sites (Zillow, RedFin, IDX Broker Inc., etc.) from incrementing their days count on listings that they have already received, as many of these sites and portals calculate “days on site” according to their own systems. We have no control over that. Your listing will display as off-market on those sites.
Cancel (Off-Market)
If you and your seller want to cancel the listing agreement, then you can set the status to Canceled in the MLS. The same “new” modification will apply as for Hold. We will allow the “new” status indicator to be added to listings once this extraordinary set of circumstances has passed, regardless of requirements for number of days kept off the market.
Virtual Open Houses (On-Market)
Should you choose to keep your listing Active “on-market” we are also allowing HTML links for virtual open houses or home walk-through videos in the Open House Comments field. Perhaps you plan to use Facebook Live Stream to do a virtual Open House during the specified open house time slot, you can add comments about this without penalty. Also, we encourage you to make more extensive use of the existing Virtual Media links from the Revise Listing page.