What buyer's agents wish listing agents knew about feedback requests
Buyer's agents answer feedback requests that are short, anonymous, and easy to complete on a phone between appointments. They ignore long forms, logins, and repeated chasing. Ask once, ask quickly, make it clear the seller will never see a name, and accept a non-answer without following up a third time.
The Showfeed team · Last updated
What is proper etiquette for asking a buyer's agent for feedback?
Ask once, soon after the showing, in the channel the agent already uses, with a form that takes seconds rather than minutes. Make anonymity explicit. Send one reminder at most. Then stop, whatever happens, because the relationship is worth more than the response.
Everything else people argue about is decoration. Tone, pleasantries, whether you open with a compliment about their buyer: none of it changes the decision the agent is making, which is whether answering is cheap enough and safe enough to bother with.
It helps to remember that you are asking a competitor for a favor with no reciprocal benefit. That framing makes the etiquette obvious: keep the ask small, remove the risk, and do not make it awkward when the answer is nothing.
What buyer's agents actually want from a feedback request
None of these are about politeness. Each one removes a specific reason not to reply.
- Tell me which house you mean
An agent may have shown four properties that day. A request that opens with the address and the showing time can be answered from memory; one that says 'thanks for showing my listing' requires the agent to go look something up, and they will not.
- Do not make me create an account
A login screen is where most requests die. There is no version of this favor that is worth a password reset, and asking for one signals that the request was designed for your convenience rather than theirs.
- Promise anonymity and mean it
The reason price feedback is vague is liability. An agent who says a listing is fifteen thousand over does not want that sentence, with their name on it, forwarded to a seller who may be across the table from them in a month. Say plainly that the seller sees the substance and never the source.
- Let me answer in one hand
Most feedback gets filled in a car or a lobby. Taps beat typing. If there is a comment box, mark it optional and mean that too, because a required text field turns a ten-second task into a task for later, and later does not arrive.
- Do not call me to ask if I got the text
This is the most reliable way to convert a probable response into a permanent non-response. The agent now associates your listings with pressure, and that association outlives the transaction.
Why do buyer's agents ignore feedback requests?
Because responding costs them time and carries a small professional risk, and returns them nothing. That is the whole calculation. It is not laziness, it is not disrespect for you, and it will not be fixed by a warmer message.
The risk half is underrated. A buyer's agent who criticises a listing in writing has created a record that can be forwarded, screenshotted, or quoted back during negotiation on that very property. Experienced agents have watched that happen and adjusted accordingly, which is why so much feedback is bland enough to be useless.
The time half is simpler. Feedback sits below every task with a client attached to it, so it never reaches the top of the list. The only reliable fix is to make the task so small it never has to compete for a slot.
Requests that get answered, and requests that get ignored
Same information requested, different odds of getting it. The difference is entirely in what the responder has to do.
| Answered | Ignored |
|---|---|
| A text with the address and a direct link | An email titled 'Feedback request' with no address in the subject |
| Three tap questions and an optional comment | A twelve-field form with required free text |
| States that the seller never sees a name | Says nothing about who reads the answers |
| Arrives the same afternoon | Arrives four days later asking about a showing they barely recall |
| One reminder, then silence | A third message, then a call, then a message to their broker |
What to do with the answers you get
Aggregate before you share, and never pass a comment to a seller in a form that identifies who said it. Breaking anonymity once, even accidentally, ends your feedback supply in a small market faster than any other mistake on this page.
Aggregation also makes the feedback more useful, not less. One agent's opinion about a kitchen is taste. Six agents raising the same objection is a defect, and it is the version a seller can accept without feeling personally judged. The mechanics of that conversation are covered in what to tell your seller after a showing.
If you want the actual wording for the ask, the feedback request text messages are free to copy. Showfeed sends that sequence automatically and keeps every response anonymous to the seller, with one automated reminder, at most one manual nudge from the listing agent, and an immediate stop on request.