A Thought on Open Houses

Open houses have always been considered an essential marketing practice. It’s almost automatic...when the home first hits the market, fire it up with an open house, or two, or three. Sellers expect it. But lately have you noticed that Realtors are doing less and less of these? What’s happening? Are open houses falling to the wayside?

The fact is that open houses are on the decline with many agencies. Many agents simply find no value in them. Explaining this to a seller may prove to be difficult at best. How dare we neglect the seller in this manner? But in the meantime, any agent with experience knows that open houses rarely result in the sale of the home and as such hardly warrant the time and expense. There is a very strong argument that in many markets, an agent’s time and money are much more effectively spent on other endeavors. Again, try explaining this to a seller though! For this reason, open houses will most likely stay around for quite a while. Still, it irks me a bit that we conduct such a costly and time consuming endeavor which almost always proves fruitless, only to appease clients. Is this truly in our clients’ best interest? I’d argue not. After all, what is our job, to appease or to get the job done?

Why do sellers believe open houses to be essential? Well, it’s traditional. They’ve always been done. Not doing open houses is definitely against the grain. Most agents who still do open houses do so for the purpose of generating buyer leads…leads who will inevitably buy someone else’s house. This does the agent some good, but it does the seller no good of course. It’s really quite an interesting situation if you think about it.

For me, I’d rather spend my time and money effectively and produce a sale in short order. This of course, instead of spending time and money on endeavors (like open houses) which I know are very ineffective in our market. Any time I spend ineffectively lengthens the time of market. Not a good thing. Is it possible I’m actually doing my client a disservice by holding an open house that I know statistically will be ineffective? I just think it’s something to think about.

Ineffective business practices ought to be cut loose. It’s our job to educate clients and sell houses. It seems to me that in many markets, where we’re finding open houses to be quite ineffective, we’re failing at both.