An open house is an invaluable opportunity to let your client’s home shine! There are things that you can do to ensure that your open house goes off without a hitch – on your side that is. In most cases though, prospective buyers will have their own real estate sales professional and the more equipped you are to close a deal at the open house, the better off you’ll be.
Let’s start off with some open house basics:
Staging – Your client doesn’t have to go crazy with renovations – just some simple changes can make the open house go off with a bang. This blog on Frontdoor.com http://www.frontdoor.com/real-estate/4-steps-to-staging-for-an-open-house provides 4 simple staging ideas to prep for an open house.
Promoting – You can promote the open house online on real estate specific sites like Trulia.com and Zillow.com, on apps like ViMO by sending out invites to connect and newsletters once they’ve consented to receive communications from you, announcing the open house, and on social media sites. On Facebook consider announcing your open house in real estate specific groups. Make sure that the open house is promoted through signage on the property itself and distribute marketing materials in the community to make neighbours aware of the event.
Keep your client out of the house. Most open houses are more effective when the homeowner is not there because potential buyers are free to express themselves and their opinions about the home.
The day of… final preparation:
- Arrive at the home early
- Ensure that the home is secure and that the client has stowed away all valuables
- Do a final walk through to make sure that there are no personal effects in the home that could cause a prospective buyer to form an opinion based on the current homeowner and not the home
- Smell – open windows to air out the home and distribute fresh, neutral air fresheners throughout the house
- Have a promo area – set up a table but the door with not just business cards and feature sheets but also more details about the property
- Tech it up! Have a tablet available with information that can be sent electronically, to capture attendance and to have attendees sign up for your newsletter
Be diligent – supporting the other side makes for a diligent open house
Finally, just because you are prepared for your open house, doesn’t mean the real estate sales professional on the other side is! You don’t want anything to delay an offer so if you have a hot prospect on the line – you want to close that deal!
You don’t want to get caught up in the other real estate sales professional on the other side leaving with their client, preparing paper offers and then starting up with the flurry of faxes and emails back and forth.
- Have a room set-up in the house where the real estate sales professional can speak privately with their client. If the client has a room with a computer in it, that is ideal.
- Speak to the other real estate sales professional quietly and let them know that you have all the resources needed to answer any questions that they may have and an area for them to do any research they need to or to simply speak with their client privately – this includes them performing their own research on your property.
- If the client does have a room with a computer in it, have GeoWarehouse loaded up so that the other real estate sales professional can simply log in and perform whatever research they need to.
- In some instances there may not be a computer to use, but remember we mentioned tech-ing it out by having a tablet.
- Ensure you have an app like ViMO loaded up so that if the real estate sales professional on the other side has a client who wants to make an offer you can help the other real estate sales professional through creating the offer electronically on your tablet, after which it can be signed electronically. In the absence of a computer this app can also be used to perform property related research including sales comps.
The diligent open house is the best open house, and GeoWarehouse can help. Contact us today by calling 1-866-237-5937.
