There are two things that make for successful open house ideas. The first is getting as many interested parties as you can within the property and the second is getting offers for the listing. In our opinion, though, actual offers trump foot traffic.
If you’re looking for successful open house ideas, we’ve got your back. In this article, we’ll go over several tips and approaches to help you transform your next open house into a hit. Let’s get to it!
1. Host Virtual Open House Events
If this past year has taught us anything is that remote work actually works for a lot of industries (including real estate). Traditionally, open houses are big events that involve you preparing the property, offering refreshments, and trying to have conversations with everyone present. To put it simply, open homes involve a lot of work on your end.
Virtual open homes, on the other hand, can be much easier to manage. You can schedulle an event via Zoom, for example, share it on social media, and let users join in from their own homes:
That’s a virtual open home poster from the Jigglar archives, which you can use to promote your own remote house showings. Some of the advantages of hosting remote open homes include:
- Being able to accomodate hundreds of viewers versus just a handful or a couple dozen
- You can do one single tour for all the participants and allow them to ask questions during specific times
- Viewers can reach out to you privately if they’re interested without leaving the call
- You can record virtual open homes and upload them to your social media profiles
If you record open houses, every person that follows your real estate agency on social media will be able to take the tour even if they missed the event. That can translate to additional leads.
With this successful open house idea, you won’t ever need to provide refreshments or make sure that visitors don’t get into restricted areas ever again.
2. Offer Digital Sign-In Sheets
One hallmark of open houses is that visitors have to sign in to show they attended the event. Usually, they do that on a piece of paper. However, since we’re in the 21st century, it makes much more sense to use a table to enable open house visitors to sign in.
There are several advantages of collecting visitor data using a digital device, including:
- You can create signup forms so attendees will get signed to your email list
- You’ll be able to submit “Thank you” emails to visitors, which you can configure to send automatically
- Using a tablet versus paper makes you look more modern
Ultimately, one of the biggest reasons to host open houses is to help you collect leads. Even if most of the visitors aren’t interested in that specific property, they might love one of your other listings. However, you’ll never know that if you don’t collect their contact information.
As far as successful open house ideas go, this one is relatively easy to implement. If you can have an assistant help you sign in visitors as they arrive (for the non tech-savvy folks), it’ll make the process much faster .
3. Invite the Neighbors to Your Open House
Neighbors can make or break a property. If you have a listing in a lovely area and you know that the neighbors are a wonderful bunch, then inviting them to your open house can actually help you get offers much faster.
In our experience, neighbors are usually more than happy to share their experience about what it’s like to live in the area. If they love the neighborhood, they’ll talk it up to your open house visitors. In most cases, those visitors are much more likely to trust neighbors than to take real estate agents at face value.
If you want to be sure that neighbors will attend your open house, you need to make sure they know about it. Distributing open house flyers around the neighborhood is a great way to make that happen:
That VIP open house flyer from the Jigglar archives is sure to get the neighbor’s attention. To make the event even more enticing, make sure to mention that you’ll offer refreshments and maybe even freebie bags!
Conclusion
Open houses should be fun events. You have dozens of people coming together to see if a listing is the home they’ve been looking for and maybe even competing with each other to get it. Throw in some neighbors talking about the area and you have the makings of a fun day.
As a real estate agent, you need to be on the lookout for successful open home ideas such as:
- Hosting virtual open house events
- Offering digital sign-in sheets
- Inviting neighbors to your open house
If you want to make your next open house even more successful, you can sign up for Jigglar and get access to dozens of templates that you can use to market the event. With Jigglar you can create gorgeous open house flyers in a matter of minutes. Sign up for a free account and try it out!
