Are Open Houses Losing Effectiveness?

It depends on where your market is.

From around the country, I hear everything from 'they're a total waste of time' to 'sellers demand open houses' to 'I get lots of prospects from open houses'.

There's always a lot of discussions on this topic.

With high gas prices looking like they're here to stay, many consumers may very well decide to do more home searching on the Internet instead driving aimlessly around neighborhoods near and far.

Consumers also have busier lives and don't want to have to drive to open house after open house if they can target in on fewer properties by viewing virtual tours and photos online instead.

I believe it's more important than ever to expand the Internet presence of your listings. Put them on as many local and national web sites as possible. In addition to your own web site (you do have a personal web site, don't you? It's a must!) and your company's web site, go to other sites, like Zillow, Trulia, Craigslist, Google, Yahoo and many others and post your listing information there. Make sure that you post the open house dates as well.

You also want to see how you can track the number of people visiting your various web sites, so that you can report that back to your sellers.

Some other open house strategies are:

• Notify other agents with nearby listings of your open house and that you'll honor their clients.
  
• Have a "Neighbors Only" open house for an hour on a week night right after you list it.
  
• Reduce the open house hours down to 1 hour or 1.5 hours. (If prospects want to see the home, they'll make the time frame or call you for a private viewing.)
  
• Ask one of your preferred mortgage lenders to attend the open house with their laptop and pre-qualify the prospects.
  

Again, different areas have different results to open houses. Find out what works best in your area and try some various strategies to make your open house as effective as possible.

If you've been holding open houses, please share with me what's been effective for you and I'll pass on the strategies here on my blog.

To your success,

Dan

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