Guide · 6 min read

How to Write Showing Instructions That Actually Work

Most showing instructions are written once, in a hurry, by someone standing in the driveway. Then they get copied forward for a year. Here is what belongs in them.

The test a good instruction passes

An agent who has never been to the property, arriving after dark, in the rain, with a buyer in the car, should be able to get in and out without calling you. If your instructions do not survive that scenario, they are notes to yourself rather than instructions.

What belongs in there

• Where to actually park. Not the address. Whether the driveway is shared, whether the neighbor tows, whether the alley is the real access.
• Which door. The lockbox is on a door. Say which one and how to reach it. “Side door off the carport” prevents a phone call.
• The gate. Locked or not, the code, and whether it has to be closed behind them. Livestock make this non-negotiable.
• Pets. Where the dog will be, whether it can be let out, and what happens if it gets loose. This is the single most common cause of a showing going wrong.
• Alarm. The code and the disarm sequence, plus what the panel looks like. An agent standing in front of a beeping keypad with 45 seconds is not going to read carefully.
• Lights, shoes, and what to leave. One line. Sellers care about this more than agents expect and it costs nothing to say.
• Anything genuinely hazardous. The basement step that is shorter, the deck board, the well cover in the grass, the septic lid. Say it plainly.

What does not belong in there

Sales copy. The instructions field is not a second listing description and an agent skimming it on a phone will miss the gate code buried in a paragraph about the granite.

Anything you would not want circulated. Assume the text gets forwarded, screenshotted, and pasted into a group chat, because it does. That is an argument for the next section rather than for leaving out the code.

The timing problem nobody thinks about

Access details usually go out too early. They land in the confirmation email at the moment of booking, or they sit on the listing page for anyone who looks, and by the end of a listing the code has reached dozens of people, several of whom never showed the house.

The fix is to release the details at approval rather than at request, and to send them to a person rather than post them. Showing Bell does this by default: the entry instructions are withheld until the showing is actually approved, then delivered to the confirmed agent. In the SMS log the codes are redacted, so the record of the message does not become a second copy of the credential.

Rewrite it when the property changes

The instructions written when the sellers lived there stop being true the week they move out. The dog is gone, the alarm is off, the utilities may be shut down, and the lockbox may have moved. Nobody remembers to update the field, and the agent shows up expecting a dog that is 200 miles away.

Two moments are worth a rewrite: when the home goes vacant, and when the season changes if access involves a driveway that snows in.

A template you can steal

Park on the street, driveway is shared with 412. Lockbox is on the side door off the carport, not the front. Gate latch sticks, lift and pull. Two cats, indoor only, do not let out. No alarm. Please leave the kitchen light on and lock the side door behind you. Basement stairs have a low beam at the bottom, watch your head.

Seven sentences, no adjectives, and it answers every call you would otherwise get.

Questions