For as long as I have been around the real estate block, there have been open houses. Whether the property you were trying to sell was new construction or a regular resale, the expectation was that you would hold an open house (or several) over the life of the listing. Open houses were traditionally seen as a marquis way to give an opportunity to check out the home in person, ask questions about it, and hopefully, experience love at first sight and make an offer for purchase. However, during a great majority of that time, there wasn’t the wealth of rich, robust visual property information online like we have today. With over 90% of homebuyers in recent years reporting they get their home-of-choice information from the internet or directly from their Realtor (who also uses other cloud-hosted technology vs. old school on-person visits to obtain info to pass on to clients), it seems like open houses are quickly going the way of the dodo bird.
Today's homebuyers do a ton of upfront comparison shopping and research online, way before ever putting their key into the ignition and putting the address of your home-sweet-home for sale into their GPS. The ability for a tech-savvy listing agent to upload galleries of high-quality photos and full color flyers has made it easy (and desirable) for buyers to skip time/gas wasting open houses, and stick to virtual shopping combined with one-on-one personal showings with Realtors. If you have been a part of the housing market lately or have every toyed with the idea of buying or selling, you know that an amazing buffet of available property information is only a click away. Even people who aren’t actively on the market do their fair share of window shopping for houses... And why not? It’s fun and free!
Open houses definitely do still happen these days (I do occasionally hold them!), but the reasons why they are held are no longer a part of conventional wisdom nor expected best practices. I use open houses on a case-by-case basis but no longer insist upon them as a standard part of my marketing plan--it has to make sense for the property to schedule one. Though in theory they sound powerful, open houses tend to most often benefit the agents (potential for walk-in buyer clients), they allow for neighbors to buzz by and compare their apples to yours (allowing open house agents to chat it up and possibly get additional listings), and often serve as entertainment for folks who bounce from open house to open house on the weekends looking for decorating ideas and free coffee (yes, that never fails to happen!). In my opinion, entering an open house in the listing system and using it as a fresh reason to promote the property publicly is where the remaining value stil exists - not in the event itself. And in the reality of a modern market, most often the solution to a stale listing problem is the price of the home, or something else material to the property that is the obstacle to selling the home quickly – not the absence of fresh-baked cookie smell in the air and balloons in the yard on weekend mornings.
I do still believe there is still some room for open houses in a marketing arsenal given specific circumstances (for example, holding a Broker’s open house when a large price reduction has been made, or when something new and special about the property is announced, like a renovation or improvement), but the application of open houses is much less weighty than it once was. Open houses will continue to trend in that declining direction as virtual technology in home marketing continues to amaze us. So perhaps in the future, we might be putting open houses in the same nostalgic "back in my day" bin as things like records and 8 track tapes.
What do you think? Have you ever used open houses as an actual targeted buying tool? Have you had success with selling your home using an open house? Or have you ever run the weekend open house looky-loo circuit “just for kicks?” (It’s ok – you can admit it--I won't judge!)
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