Internet – the New Open House?

During the 1960-1980’s, open houses and paper advertisements were the #1 marketing tool in real estate. Before the internet, that was really the main way that most consumers would know about listings. Real estate has changed! Today, most listings will be available to potential buyers, at their fingertips. Just like most buyers will research their favorite shoes to buy or a car to purchase, they will do preliminary homework online before seeing homes. It’s actually extremely rare today that a buyer would go out to the marketplace, without doing some sort of internet browsing. Why would you want to wast

We are still seeing a ton of open houses around the area every weekend. Most homes are selling within a 60-day period or less, regardless of open houses, while some are selling the first 14 days or less. When a listing sits on the market for an extended period of time, regardless of the price bracket, it will typically be a price and value issue, versus needing more open house exposure. We’ve done lots of open houses over the years, and the ones recently in the last 10 years, for example, will typically get from 2-10 people during a 5-hour period. They will also be very low-quality buyers or just noisy neighbors, who are curious of their neighbor’s house. It also brings up a big security issue, where potential burglars will scout out a property to rob. It’s actually very common today. We’ve seen another noteworthy marketing strategy, where agents will underprice a home 10-15% and hold back buyer showings during the week, until the big open house event on the weekend. In that situation, they would probably get multiple offers regardless of the open house event due to deeply underpricing the home, and are trying to get buyers to overpay when they hold back showings on properties that are underpriced.

We always recommend the strategy of fairness. Price the home correctly, hire us to sell the home and you’ll usually have a very successful outcome!