Showed Up

The problem in detail

Agents schedule appointments with counterparties they don't control — listing agents, tenants, inspectors, contractors — and those commitments are quietly dropped. Nobody confirms, nobody cancels, and the agent only finds out when they and their client are standing outside a locked door. The only fallback is manual chasing by phone, text and email the night before, which is easy to forget during a busy week, and the fallout is wasted travel, embarrassed clients, blown contingency deadlines and lost referrals.

Proposed product

A lightweight appointment confirmation service for agents. You forward or enter an appointment (time, address, counterparty's name and mobile/email) and the product runs a confirmation ladder on your behalf: a polite text 48 hours out, a follow-up 24 hours out, a final check the morning of. The counterparty replies with a single tap — confirmed, reschedule, or cancel — no app or login. If nothing comes back by your cutoff, you get an escalation alert naming the appointment at risk and a one-tap option to call or send a reschedule link. Every confirmation, silence and cancellation is timestamped into a simple log you can show a client or broker, and a running reliability record per counterparty tells you who habitually ghosts.

Why now

This is mostly a long-standing problem rather than a new one: agents have always chased counterparties by phone the night before, and reviews of the dominant MLS-distributed scheduling app (2.4/5 across ~849 ratings, with reports of notifications silently failing) show the incumbent channel is not closing the loop. What has changed is that automated SMS reminder vendors such as GoReminders and Apptoto now sell into real estate, so the plumbing is cheap and the remaining gap is escalation and evidence, not reminders.

Smallest useful version

A no-frills web form plus SMS: agent pastes in appointment details, the system texts the counterparty a confirm/reschedule/cancel link on a fixed 48h/24h/morning-of schedule and pushes an unconfirmed alert to the agent. Manual entry only, no calendar or MLS integration, text-message channel only. Test with 20–30 agents in two markets for six weeks, measuring confirmation response rate and no-shows avoided.

Potential ways to charge

• Free trial — £0 for 14 days: up to 10 appointments on the full ladder, so an agent can see whether counterparties actually reply before paying (typical for comparable tools)
• Solo — £15 per month: unlimited appointments for one agent, confirmation ladder, escalation alerts and timestamped log (typical for comparable SMS reminder tools; well under the cost of a part-time VA doing the same confirming work, as in the VA role description in the evidence)
• Team — £45 per month: up to five agents, shared counterparty reliability record across the team, exportable logs for the broker (typical for comparable tools)
• Brokerage — £250 per month: 25+ seats, branded sender name, office-wide reliability reporting and onboarding (typical for comparable tools; no price evidence found for brokerage software)

Routes to early customers

• Agent Q&A and forum threads where no-show complaints already appear (the City-Data style threads in the evidence, plus agent subreddits and Facebook groups) — offer to run the ladder manually for free for a week
• Brokerage sales meetings for newer agents: office managers control the floor-time and training slots where tools get demonstrated
• Real estate virtual assistant agencies and VA job boards — the people currently paid to confirm appointments are a direct route to the agents paying them
• Home inspectors and transaction coordinators, who sit on the other side of the same no-shows and talk to many agents each week

Main risks

• Counterparties who already ignore the agent's personal texts may also ignore an automated one — the central untested assumption, and nothing in the evidence shows reply rates for cold confirmation texts
• Texting listing agents, tenants and inspectors with whom there is no prior relationship raises consent and TCPA-style exposure; the evidence explicitly records this as unchecked, and carrier filtering of unknown-sender links could kill delivery
• GoReminders and Apptoto already sell real-estate SMS reminders with no-show claims, so the reminder job is commoditised; the escalation ladder, reliability record and audit log must be the actual product
• A 'reliability record' naming fellow agents who ghost could be reputationally and legally touchy inside a referral-driven profession, and agents may refuse to use it
• Solo and newer agents are the most budget-constrained segment, and the evidence surfaced no willingness-to-pay signal at all

Questions to test first

• Concierge test: for 10 agents, enter their appointments by hand for two weeks and send the ladder yourself. Measure counterparty reply rate at 48h, 24h and morning-of, and count appointments saved.
• Ask those agents directly whether an automated message going out under their name to a fellow agent feels acceptable, and watch for any relationship complaints during the test.
• Get a short written opinion on consent rules for texting counterparties the agent has no relationship with, and test deliverability of links from an unknown short-code to a sample of numbers.
• Price conversation: show the working log to 20 agents and ask what they currently pay a VA or assistant for confirming, then offer the £15/month plan and count card details taken.
• Test whether the audit log is the hook by asking agents to recall the last time they wished they could prove a counterparty was given notice.

Evidence and sources

The sources this assessment is based on. Evidence level: Supported, counted from these sources as described in how ideas are assessed. Findings are what a source shows; anything the research only inferred is marked as an inference.

Research findings

• SupportsApp Store user reviews

  Shows: product-review complaint showing scheduling tool unreliability

  User reviews of Home by ShowingTime report the app being 'unreliable for showing requests' — request notifications via text/email stopping working consistently, which reviewers say nearly caused them to miss a showing and lose their preparation window, with an explicit mention of how embarrassing it would be for a buyer to arrive at an unprepared home. This is an observed complaint from outside the discussion communities where the idea was found, and matches the candidate's failure mode (silent, unconfirmed appointments discovered too late).

• SupportsApp Store listing

  Shows: aggregate product rating for incumbent showing-scheduling app

  The ShowingTime iOS app — the dominant MLS-distributed showing scheduling product — carries a 2.4 out of 5 rating across ~849 ratings, with reviews citing lost connectivity and repeated forced sign-outs. Observed: the rating and review themes. Inference (not observed): broad dissatisfaction with the incumbent leaves room for a lightweight confirmation layer, though it also shows agents already have a scheduling channel they may be reluctant to supplement.

• SupportsReal estate virtual assistant job description template

  Shows: job/role description showing confirmation done manually by paid humans

  A real estate VA job description template lists duties including managing showings and open houses, setting lockbox/Supra eKey access, confirming appointments and capturing attendance notes, for candidates with 3+ years supporting agents. Observed: appointment confirmation is written into paid remote-assistant roles. Inference: agents today solve the confirmation problem by delegating to labour, which both validates the need and sets the price anchor the product must beat.

• SupportsHAR.com agent Q&A thread and City-Data real estate professionals forum

  Shows: customer-community account of counterparty no-shows

  Agent Q&A thread titled around three agents booking appointments and not showing; a City-Data forum thread describes four consecutive showing appointments where agents no-showed without any call, with sellers having cleaned and vacated, and one poster wishing someone would build a site tracking no-show realtors. Supports both the problem and the candidate's per-counterparty reliability record — but this is the same community class the idea came from, so it corroborates rather than independently validates.

• Weakens the caseVendor marketing and review pages

  Shows: existing vendors targeting the same job

  GoReminders markets a real-estate showing scheduler explicitly promising to stop no-shows via automated SMS reminders, and Apptoto sells automated reminders with a real-estate vertical and no-show fee collection; both publish customer testimonials about cutting no-shows and eliminating manual night-before calls. Observed: these competitors exist and already claim the reminder job. Inference: 'Showed Up' must differentiate on the escalation ladder, counterparty reliability scoring and the auditable timestamped log, since plain reminders are commoditised.

Where the problem was reported

Public posts in which people described this problem, grouped into one problem before research began.

• Challenges between associates and staff · r/Dentistry · 23 September 2026
• How F#+*ed are we? Update Pics · r/electricians · 8 May 2025
• People not showing up for appointments · r/realtors · 14 December 2019
• We are buyers and having some issues with our realtor. Are our expectations realistic? · r/realtors · 29 October 2019

Looked for, not found

• No search-demand data (keyword volume for terms like 'confirm showing appointment' or 'realtor no-show tracker'), no issue-tracker item, and no freelance marketplace posting with a stated price for appointment-confirmation work surfaced in the results returned. Market size, willingness to pay by solo/newer agents (who are the most budget-constrained segment), and the TCPA/consent implications of texting counterparties an agent does not have a relationship with all remain unknown and should be checked before building.