“I had enough. That whole morning we would spend cleaning up, tidying things, and that was time we couldn’t spend playing with him…At some point, after hiding things every weekend, you kind of just want to lay them out on the floor.”
– Brooklyn homeowner Emily Huters, who accepted an offer on her two-bedroom home this winter, in part to end the hassle of hiding away her infant’s highchair and toys prior to weekend open houses. Her Realtor tells the New York Times that Huters and her husband received an offer close to their $825,000 asking price, but could have pulled in almost $900,000 if they had waited until the spring thaw.
Obviously each seller has priorities and points at which enough’s enough, but thankfully the Times doesn’t try to spin Huters’ case as a trend among sellers.
I’ve worked hundreds of open houses and met many of my clients at them. They are a disruption for our selling clients, can create safety and liability issues for the homeowner and Realtor and ineffective for actually selling the home. They are more a tool for the agent to gain business than anything else.
Sure there are plenty of stories where people saw a home at an open house and eventually bought it… however, the vast majority of those first saw the house on the Internet or from their agent’s searches. An appointment can just as easily be made after that if they are really interested in buying a home.
In the boom where a house would sell quickly, an open house would act as sort of an auction. You could get a lot of people in the home during a three hour period and expect an offer to follow. Now, it’s mostly people “seeing what’s out there”.
We’d consider an open house if we had a property that was truly priced to sell quickly (within the first three weeks) and we expected a lot of showing requests. We could save the homeowner time by grouping the showings on the first weekend after listing.
I’ve always had the impression (which could be very wrong/off), at least in New York, that the open house is a necessity for a sale.
I also tried to sell my home while I had an infant child. Little ones tend to have lots of stuff including toys, strollers, high chairs, safety gates etc. It was a huge inconvenience dismantling the house before each showing and hiding all of the kiddie stuff. It is exhausting enough just to clean for every showing, all of the kiddie items just made it that much worse. My heart goes out to families with little ones that go through the same thing.
The effectiveness of open houses, like almost every aspect of real estate, varies with the type of property, its price and its location.
Open houses are almost never held in some Chicago suburbs and are almost mandatory in others at certain price ranges. This obviously results in different buyer behavior and expectations in different locations.
Sellers need to know how effective open houses are for properties in their price range in their specific location rather than paying attention to any general statements about open houses.