Are open houses good for selling my house?

Now, I gotta give you a little bit of background. I used to be very, very skeptical about doing open houses for my clients and I’ll tell you why. Going back to the old-school methods of selling real estate, which is what I came from, we were trained, as agents, “Do open houses. Do open houses. Do open houses” 

The reason was that in general, they are a great source of leads for real estate agents, and that’s what every real estate agent wants.

But, back then I learned that it wasn’t very effective for selling a house and I’ll tell you why. In the old-school way of doing it, we used to go out and put signs for miles around the open house, pointing to the house to get people to get there. And if you think about it, the only way people found out about the open house back then was the signs typically, and they would follow that from mile away.

Now think about it.  Before they even got to the house, they never knew anything about the property. They didn’t know if it was a house. If it was a condo. If it was a townhouse. Did it have a garage? How many beds and baths did it have? Was it in a good neighborhood? What the square footage was. What the price was. They didn’t know anything about the house. 

So, the odds are that somebody who’s following a bunch of signs from a mile away, or a half a mile, or even only a few blocks away aren’t going to know anything at all.

 Because they don’t know anything about the house, they aren’t gonna know a darn thing about it and therefore, not really be a good fit for that property, but, again, it was a great lead for us agents. 

They would come in and we would try to chat them up and get their contact information and be buddy-buddy with them and put them in our pipeline.  But I actually had a seller come home one day and he said, “Well how many offers did you get?” And I said, “Well, none.” He said, “How many leads did you get?” Which I was surprised that he asked that, and I was honest. I told him, “I actually got 14 leads out of this.” And he says, “Okay. Great. So you marketed the home to the wrong people.” It really caught me off guard.

I was like, “Oh my gosh.” So, I had to rethink the whole open house process, which ultimately led me to coming up with my Amazing Open House program.  You can go see more about that at amazingopenhouse.com 

So I had to think about it, and I asked myself, “Am I trying to do the best thing for the seller?” 

And for a long time I wouldn’t do open houses for that very reason.

 It was a waste of time for the seller to spend so much time and energy to clean a house, prepare it and get it ready for that open house. Then they would go away for several hours throughout the day just to allow us to sit there in the open house on a weekend and collect leads, and it wasn’t fair to the seller.

Now things have changed quite a bit.  Like I said before, the only way people found open houses, back then, was through signs. But now, it’s quite interesting, because when I do open houses, I may put three or four signs out, and it’s more just within the neighborhood just to kind of help direct people to the property. 

The interesting thing is people have already looked up the property on, guess what…their phone! And through whatever app they’re using, whatever website that they’re looking at it on, it’ll show up as, “There’s an open house” But guess what they also get to do. They get to look at all the details about the property.

So before they get there, they know how many beds and baths it is. They’ve already seen the pictures. They know all the details about the property. And now, they’re coming by, and they’re actually looking because they’re interested. And so, this is actually a good thing. And so, my mindset has shifted with regard to open houses. But here’s the thing you need to know. And if you have an agent listing a house for you, you have to know that they are a adept digital marketer.  This is critical.

And of course, all of them say that their company has a huge online presence, but is that specific agent a good digital marketer? Because there’s a few things that should be done. Number one, in the MLS, it should be posted that they’re doing an open house. Not the day before, because it takes time for that to propagate out to all of the different websites.

It should be updated there, Monday before the open house. That way, it gets on to all those sites, so on Saturday morning, when those people wake up and go, “You know what, let’s go see if there’s open houses. “Oh look there’s that house that we were kind of thinking about, Oh, and they’re having an open house? Lets go.” 

Also, we used to take flyers and we would flyer the neighborhood. “Hey, there’s an open house.” Well, there’s a better, easier way to do it now. Where you can just target ads to that particular open house and it’s very, very inexpensive for the agent to do. 

You target the whole neighborhood around and it’s a whole lot more effective than some real estate agent walking around dropping off flyers to a couple hundred homes. We target 2,000 to 3,000 homes immediately surrounding that neighborhood. Why? Because the neighbors want to get to know that a house is up for sale because sometimes they’re the best referral sources for buyers. 

They call up, “Hey Susie. You know what? You said you wanted to live in this neighborhood. Guess what! A home came up for sale and they’re having an open house today. Can you come by?” And there’s a few other things that we do to really make sure that we get the impact. 

Like I said, with our Amazing Open House program, we’ll have somewhere in the neighborhood of 150 to 250 people come to a single open house; targeted buyers. Real Targeted buyers. So, really think about your strategy. If it’s just a matter of putting some signs up just for an agent to sit in there for a few hours, don’t bother.

If your agent is going to target buyers who are specific to your area and are interested in your property, absolutely. Do it all day long. 

So, hey if you have any questions about open houses, I’m happy to answer any questions anytime, no matter what. No obligation, no cost, anything like that. Just happy to answer questions and be a good resource for you guys. So, feel free to reach out to me whenever it’s convenient. We’ll talk to you soon. Take care.