How to set up showings for potential tenants?

[Sean Thompson]

Hey everyone! My wife and have just started looking for tenants to live in half of our duplex once we move out. 

Little backstory: We have been house hacking in our duplex for the last 2 years. We live in one half, and we have a tenant in the other half. We inherited our current tenant and he has been great. However, that means we have never done tenant screening before. 

Here is the problem we have been running into:

We spent over a week preparing the unit for showings by cleaning, decluttering, and fixing minor things. Then we posted the ad on Zillow, Trulia, and Hot Pads. We posted the ad on a Monday, and had lots of calls about the property over the next 5 days. We set it up so that anyone who wanted to look at the property could schedule an appointment for either Saturday or Sunday. We scheduled 13 people to come look at the property. 7 on Saturday, and 6 on Sunday. We cleared both of our schedules and prepared for two days of being very busy.

Only 2 people showed up. 

Two people actually texted us to cancel their showing, but everyone else didn't call, text, email... nothing. We basically sat around the house for two days. 

Is this normal for anyone else? Is there something that we could be doing differently? Any advice would be greatly appreciated. We keep telling ourselves that at least it all of the "no-shows" would have been bad tenants anyway, and it saved us the time of having to run full background checks, credit checks, etc. But we still need to find a tenant! Please help!