A lot of agents swear by open houses, and others say it's not worth it. In our opinion, open houses are a great way to commit to closing a sale. Just like anything, it works if you put in the effort.
Here are 6 tips that will help you increase the chances of a successful open house.
#1 Open Houses Go on the MLS on Mondays.
There are about 500 open houses that happen in the Coachella Valley every Friday - Sunday. If you look at your preferred MLS, there are usually about 5% posted on Monday, 15% on Tuesday, 40% on Wednesday, 80% on Thursday, and 100% on Friday.
If you’re waiting until Thursday or Friday to post an open house, you’re missing out on potentially hundreds of buyers seeing your house. How pissed would you be if you were a seller and you heard your agent waited until Friday to post about an open house?
Post it on Monday.
#2 Advertise Early and Often.
Your email list is one of the highest value assets you own. And a lot of agents, even most of the Top Producers we’ve seen, do not market their open houses to their lists.
Buyers and sellers come to you to learn about properties in the area, and your client wants you to promote their property heavily. So get after it!
We’ll be sharing some really detailed guides for how you can get a huge number of views on your open houses in a follow-up email – so stay tuned!
#3 Your Open House Should Start EARLY and Be at least 4 Hours Long.
Some people are early risers, some like to start looking in the afternoon. If your open house is only in the morning, then you’re missing out on the other half of the crowd, and vise versa.
So how do you make sure you’re not losing out on either crowd? The answer - your open house should start at 10am and go until 2pm (or later).
#4 You need to put out 25 open house signs.
We’re biased here, we admit it. But, the best feedback about our services we’ve gotten has been from agents who have ordered 25 open house signs. And that makes sense! The more signs you put out, the more people see them, and the more people show up to your open house.
When we talk to agents, a lot of them tell us, “yeah I usually just go put out 5 signs around the neighborhood.” And we always bring it back to the seller. Would you feel proud to tell a seller that?
Or would you rather say, “I put out 25 signs. They’re at every highway exit, major intersection, and shopping center in the area and they’re all driving traffic to YOUR LISTING.”
As an agent, it’s a huge time sink if you or your assistant is spending hours driving around putting out signs – you have a lot of listings! But as a seller, the only property I care about is mine.
#5 Ask every person who walks in the door, “would you like to make an offer on this property?”
Yes, that sounds super aggressive, especially for us introverted types. However, your primary reason for showing the property is to sell the property. While the odds of someone making an offer are low, it will eventually happen. More importantly, it helps you prospect for new leads by listening to the way people answer the question.
“We’re just looking around” is code for, “we just started the process, we don’t know what we’re doing, and we don’t have an agent. PLEASE HELP US.”
When someone walks in and says “we’re just popping by, we live down the street,” they’re actually screaming, “I wanted to see how nice this house is because I want to know how much I can sell my house for, please help me sell!”
Don’t just take our word for it. Listen here to Andy Tse, an agent who did $10MM in gross commissions last year, talk about how to do this (and check out the rest of the video, it’s incredible).
#6 Make it easy to get and use contact info from people that show up.
This probably seems obvious, but how many open houses have you been to where the agent is using pen and paper to get contact info? Or even worse, not asking for contact info at all!
Do you really want to spend 30 minutes after a long open house trying to decipher 50 poorly-written email addresses and phone numbers, only to have your emails and phone calls bounce? Get an open house app like Spac.io and save yourself the hassle.
The Virtuous Cycle.
The more you do the activities above, the more people you get to your open houses. And the more people you get to your open houses, the more leads and contact info you get and the more valuable your email social media marketing become.
These activities really become a flywheel for your business – that means that the more energy you put into any one of these activities, the more money you make.
