Reliability over everything for me. I’d rather know that the person is 100% going to come at [x] time and buy [thing]. It doesn’t need to be today, I’ll wait until the weekend even. So long as I know when they’ll come and that they will for sure come at that time.
Having three people say they’ll come and then don’t turn up sucks. Do I hold out? Do I just go straight to the next person only to find out the first person turned up after all and now I’m shafting person #2? It’s all exhausting.
It’s hard to tell reliability in advance though. I tend to prioritise anyone who appears to have basic communication skills, which tend to be lacking in most people. If they ask questions that are covered in the listing or can’t manage to string together an actual offer to buy I tend not to bother with them.
I don’t do Facebook, so I don’t know how the marketplace thing works. In Gumtree, you can see ratings of people. “Quick Responder”, “Showed up on time” and “Polite” points account for a lot when I have a choice of buyers. If one buyer had a bunch of those and the other doesn’t, I’ll go with the one that does.
Maybe I should try Gumtree. Marketplace is mostly ferals with minimal communication skills and scammers.
