Open House: Sell Your House Successfully

Open House is a real estate marketing strategy imported from the United States. It consists of organizing an open day of a property to receive visits from potential buyers.

Unlike concerted visits with a specific client, the real estate agent who organizes an Open House seeks to show the house to as many clients as possible: from potential buyers and tenants to real estate agents who may have an interested client. This technique has proven successful for the sale of both new-build and luxury homes. But:

Advantages Of An Open House Strategy

• Time saving. Thanks to the open nature of the event, the real estate agent does not need to schedule numerous appointments on different days.
• Visit optimization. Potential clients have the opportunity to see the property without an appointment, and even repeat visits during the day. A person who has visited the property alone can return accompanied by their spouse or their own architect to have a second opinion.
• If the publicity is well directed, an Open House exponentially increases the possibility of concluding a sale, since those who attend already have prior interest.
• Attendees enjoy a relaxed and pressure-free visit. For their part, the owners of the house concentrate all potential buyers in a single event, without having to leave it vacant for several days.
• Reduced advertising investment compared to traditional advertising. In addition, the influx of visitors also improves the dissemination of the property for sale, since they can meet other interested people and serve as prescribers.
• Networking. The real estate agent, in addition to an opportunity to sell, can establish relationships with new clients from which to expand their network of professional contacts.

How To Organize An Effective Open House Event

The organization of an open day is an event whose success depends on it being done professionally to obtain the desired results. A first step is for these Open Days to be properly advertised and accompanied by outdoor signage designed for the event that makes the home more visible. The organization must be carried out by professionals in the sector: a real estate agent and a Home Staging expert who prepares the staging of the house for the visits.

The choice of the perfect day to celebrate this event is another key point, it will be necessary to take into account the season of the year, location of the house and avoid, as much as possible, rainy or very cold days, since the house will be open during a certain number of hours or throughout the day. It is preferable to celebrate it on non-working days or during the weekend, if it is not possible, it will be necessary to choose hours outside the working time slot.

The agent’s role is to greet and guide attendees and emphasize the property’s potential. You must also have detailed documentation of the property to answer the technical or commercial questions raised by the attendees.

The visit often includes a snack or snack that allows the participants to interact with each other. The visit is more pleasant and leaves a good memory.

Home Staging: How To Prepare A Property For Sale

There are studies that show that an average buyer makes a purchase decision in the first 90 seconds of entering a house. With the houses, there are crushes; sensations that arise at first sight after crossing the threshold of the house and influence the rest of the visit.

The professional in charge of promoting this crush is the Home Stager. It is an expert capable of studying the strengths of a property (light, space, distribution, etc.), configuring it, and presenting it to make it more attractive from the entrance hall itself.

Open House in an empty building

Many people, faced with an empty room, find it hard to imagine if, if they moved, they could accommodate their furniture or belongings in the available space.

Home Staging consists of preparing the house as a set, with theatrical furniture, low-cost or recycled. For an open house, it does not need to be functional furniture, only its appearance.

The cabinets, beds, bedside tables, sofas, rugs, flower pots, and even props to install in empty kitchens, provide the visitor with a visual reference on how to exploit the spaces or use the different rooms.

If the basic structure of the property is pleasing to the potential client, this touch of the interior design of the rooms will be perceived as a weighty element in making the decision to create their home there.

Open House in an occupied building

The goal is to breathe new life into an interior, making it attractive and desirable. The property must be presented in its best possible version, not excessively personalized according to the tastes of those who lived (or still live) in the house.

The property must be welcoming and clean. Apart from the hygienic sense, the sensation of cleanliness is also sought in terms of visual impact, eliminating the profusion of ornaments or other objects that give the impression of being magnets for dust and also distract the client.

Any small fault must be fixed: chips on the walls, cracked tiles, broken shutter slats, and other small maintenance faults.

You can use perfumes with plant fragrances in the garden, prepare coffee or bake bread inside the house, certain background music, and other elements that provide a feeling of visiting a home, it is what is called sensory marketing.

Elements that allow the owner’s family to be traced, such as photos, children’s drawings, etc., should be removed. If the visitor has the feeling of breaking into someone else’s house, it will be difficult for him to imagine living there.

In short, by preparing the Open House, the professional creates a home prototype that makes the visitor fall in love to the point that they visualize themselves taking root there.