Are you tired of doing open houses every single weekend and never closing a transaction? Then you need to check out these open house tips that help agents in Agent First Group close transactions at every open house. If you follow them, you’ll add an average of 11 closed transactions (not visitors—we’re talking closed commission checks!) for each open house!
7 Top Open House Tips
Here are 7 open house tips real estate agents like you can use to get more clients at every open house.
1) Commit To Open Houses
This means you need more than one open house per weekend. You need to dig deep and INVEST in creating a culture of open houses in your weekend schedule. Consider the following points as you prepare your mind and spirit to invest in this lead-generation method.
- Aim for 2-4 open houses per weekend—this is what our agents do to keep those leads rolling in!
- Think of yourself as the open house host—this is your profession now.
- Commit to 3 months of this, at least. Treat it as a quarter of the year…with open houses as your main source of income for this quarter. Committing to that many months gives you enough time to see if this tactic will work for your needs.
2) Select the Right House
When going to select a home, think about the traffic that’s going to naturally run by the area. A huge majority of your open house attendees will come from foot traffic, from people walking in the neighborhood who are curious to see a gorgeous new home.
With this in mind, avoid gated communities. You want to choose an open house in an area where there will be a lot of people in different life stages coming by. Once you’ve found the right spot, you also need to:
- Consider price points. You want to choose one within the average price point range for your farm area.
- Consider DOM. If you don’t have a listing, you’ll need to ask around to see if other agents will let you market theirs. Select homes that have been on the market longer than 2 weeks because a listing agent will almost certainly let you host an open house for them at that point—the sweet spot is 3-5 weeks.
- Avoid homes that have been on the market for months—at this point, it’s likely that there’s something in the way of a good sale and an active buyer will likely not stop by this home.
3) Use Plenty of Open House Signs
This tip is one I learned from Andy Tse, one of the top 5 agents in the country who teaches others how to gather more leads with open houses. The gist of it is: Signs, Signs, Signs! You can never have too many open house signs.
In fact, just when you think you’re overdoing it… buy more! At the bare minimum, you need 7 signs located throughout the neighborhood and in nearby communities.
4) Connect with Everyone
Connect with everyone, but not just by grabbing their contact information. You are trying to gauge interest here—not all visitors are going to sign on, and you need to accept that!
Rather than blow up the relationship by pushing for their contact information (which will be fake if you try to force them), focus on connecting with them human to human
Next up, you need to sign them in. You can use a digital CRM or a paper sign-in, but regardless, all the info you need is their name, email, and phone number.
There are multiple ways to make this process easier if you find people are resistant to giving their info. For example, you could hose a raffle/drawing with a fun prize. Or, you could create a quick 2-3 question survey that requires their contact info for registration.
Here’s a great tip that will actually prompt people to reach out to you: offer them a Similar Home Sheet. Think of Amazon, for example—Amazon always offers a list of “similar items” when you’re looking at something on the website. Have you ever clicked on one?
This is a great tactic because, after all, not everyone can buy the same home—most of these viewers will need to find something else. So, go to the MLS, search for similar properties, and print out a list with your letterhead on it to make it easy for people to reach out to you later.
5) Invest in Social Media Marketing
Post the open house announcement on all your social media channels. You can make this simple with a tool—for example, you can use Agently’s one-click posting option to quickly schedule a post. You can also use Canva to create lovely, modern graphics.
Don’t stop with typical posts, though. You should also take advantage of video marketing to really get the most bang for your buck. Try livestreams, reels, shorts, TikToks…whatever your audience likes and you think will get lots of views!
You also want to start running some Facebook Ads. Your goal is to have leads in the hopper before you put a yard sign down on the ground – let me know if you want me to make a video on the FB ad we use to get clients before – “Open House Ad”
6) Follow Up Immediately
In an analogy for my football lovers out there…this is the red zone—you’re in the final 20 yards to the end zone! Don’t leave it up to your kicker like my Vikings do every year when they start choking up. This is your time to get in the game and make a bold move.
As soon as you pick up the yard signs, send a video follow-up. You should say something short and simple like:
“Hey! It’s Jaime with the house that had the ABC. Great meeting you! I noticed there was a home that I missed adding to my “similar home sheet.” Can I send it to you?”
This allows you to engage with your audience immediately AND maintain the connection.
7) Track Your Results
Honestly, listen—you’re spending hours on these open houses! If you’re like our Agent First Group agents who are using this as part of their lead generation strategy, you are spending 20+ hours every week to put 4 of these on.
So, ultimately, you need to track! Is this working? Are you getting leads? Are your leads resulting in closed transactions?
By labeling your lead source (in this case, open houses), you know exactly where your clients are coming from and how to get more. This will help you maintain a steady flow of business heading into the future.
Well, now you have the top 7 open house tips available out there so you can get started building your income with MORE open houses. Let’s get started!