*Please honor the 24hr notice for scheduling viewing appointments. One should not just drive buy and call the realitor and ask to see the house that night...with 20 minutes notice.
*If you do schedule the viewing, at least go in and look at the house! Yes this house you are looking at is "way out in the country"...you should have known that when scheduling a viewing. If you are not sure whether or not you'd like to see the house, make a drive-by to see where the house is located.
*If for any reason you cannot attend the viewing YOU scheduled, please call your realitor and re-schedule or cancel the showing.
ginlyn
In my experience, the 24-hour-notice requirement generally means that the property is a rental. And, in this area anyway, the requirement is there because the landlord must give 24 hours of notice if needing to enter the property unless it's an emergency - even if it's the realtor who will be entering rather than the landlord.
Of course, vendors can put all the conditions that they want on the contract and realtors must honour them. However, they need to realize that by doing so, they are making their property less accessible to the market. It's not unusual for people to suddenly have to find a house (maybe they were transferred and the company is paying for one weekend of house-hunting in New Town). 24 hour notice just might not be possible for all the properties that they would like to view. In a hot market, a 24 hour requirement from the vendor might be fine, but in a slow market it could mean that the house stays on the market for months.
So, if vendors want a reasonably-quick sale, they might have to be agreeable to getting phone calls from realtors "I'm bringing some people over in a half hour, okay?" Yes, it means keeping the house in near-pristine condition at all time, doing a quick tidy-up and vacating the premises. Almost all realtors around here seem to request that the residents not be there, if at all possible. Overall - selling a house is not fun.