10 Quick Wins For Making The Most Of An Open House

An Open House event can be one of the most  crucial make or breaks of any real estate sales process. By making sure you maximise the opportunity from these events, you’ll be able to make the most of the buyer market and bring in more competitive offers.

So how do you do it? We’ve prepared this article to give you the 10 quick wins you can make on your open house events, to give you that added boost over the competition.

1. Post visually-focused content that highlights the property’s strengths prior to the listing

You could have the best property in the world, but if no-one knows it’s on the market, you’re not going to get many viewing requests. By producing a visually-heavy blog post prior to the viewing, you’ll give your target market a great overview of your property’s best features.

The blog post doesn’t have to take more than 20 minutes of your time and it’s a maintenance-free way of bringing in those leads. Make sure to cram it full of high-resolution property pictures.

2. Boost focus with a single-property site

If you’re selling a particularly high-value property and really want to flaunt its features, creating a single-property site might just be the option for you.

Placing a focus on a property like this is well worth your time. Not only will it allow you to showcase the property’s best features, it’s also a great way for you to build your brand reputation in the market.

With iHomes you can easily create single property micro-sites, click here to find out more.

3. Make the most of email marketing

Email marketing is well-known for being the most cost-effective marketing method out there. By creating a weekly newsletter-style email showcasing your latest listings and sending it out to your buyer leads, you’ll be able to get your properties in front of a much wider audience.

You can use a real estate CRM tool, such as iDashboard to manage your leads and email campaigns. Send out visual snapshots of your prime listings, coupled with one or two blog posts you’ve created, on a weekly basis.

Don’t forget to make the most of the subject line. It’s the most important part of the whole email, so choose something that’ll grab your list’s attention. Consider mentioning the open house and that you have properties that are immediately available.

4. Keep in touch with your buyer market on social media

With hundreds of millions of monthly active users, you can bet that your audience is spending time on social media. By posting pictures of your top properties, with links to the listings, you can capture any interested prospective buyers. You might even want to consider short tour videos for Instagram.

Since these are leads that you might not already have in your database, remember to add an email sign-up box on each of your listing pages.

5. Video your open houses to help promote your next one

There’s nothing worse than turning up at a desolate open house, with no-one but a lonely agent stood in the corner stirring the punch bowl.

Convince your audience that your open houses are worth their time by creating short video montages and posting them on social media.  This will work for you both ways:

• You’ll attract prospective buyers by communicating that you have properties that gain a lot of interest.
• You’ll also be able to show prospective sellers that you put in the effort when it comes to open houses, so you might even get some seller leads from it, too.

6. Target local buyers for your open houses using Google AdWords or Facebook Ads

The insane amount of data Google holds makes it a real estate agent’s dream when it comes to targeting local buyers. Set up an AdWords campaign based on local search terms relevant to your property and drive leads directly to your listing page.

AdWords is of double benefit too, because you don’t pay per ad view. Since you only pay for each click made on your link, you can save your precious budget for making your listing page look beautiful and leave it to do the heavy lifting.

Facebook Ads also allow you to cater who will be displayed such adverts, so you can setup your ads to target audiences based on age, gender, location, the devices used to access Facebook as well as pages they make like.

7. Growing your database

Open Homes or Private Inspections are a great way to add clients to your database, so make sure you collect as much information as possible from those people attending viewings. Your database is your future business garden, first we must plant the seeds, which is collecting the contacts data and entering them into your real estate CRM. Next we must water our garden, which is corresponding with your database, through email alerts, SMS’s and informative newsletters. With enough seeds and nurturing of our database, your business will be grow.

Still wondering why you should put your buyers into your CRM? Click here to read our helpful article which should help solidify how important it is.

With a tool such as iDashboard for iPad, getting your Open Home attendees into your database is easier than ever.

8. Communicate with the competition

It doesn’t always have to be a hard battle against other agencies – sometimes it can be worth working with them. Build contacts in a few local buyer’s agencies and provide them with a schedule for your weekly open houses.

It’s in their best interests to arrange sales, too, so a bit of mutual back-scratching could work out well for both parties.

9. Get your open house online with a virtual tour

With the constant rise in video technology, you should be making the most of it. There are several companies that now offer 3D imaging of properties, so why not get it set up for your listings?

3D virtual tours are an excellent way of giving your buyer audience a taster of what they can see at the open house, as well as showing those not attending what they’re missing. Who knows, you might even change their minds.

10. Work with the home-staging pros to show your listing at its finest

A very small percentage of buyers make an offer after only one visit. Many will go back to the agent after and request a second visit in private, so they can gather more information on the property.

Getting to this point is the goal. Getting there will be a lot easier if you make the property look stunning for when they first set foot in it.

Hire a professional home-stager to make sure your listing is cast in the best professional light prior to sale. These stats show just how worthwhile this can be:

• 32% of buyer’s agents believe that staged homes have a positive effect on the offer price their clients propose.
• 81% of prospective buyers believe that a staged home makes it easier to see themselves in the property.
• 46% of buyers are more open towards attending an open house event if the home has been professionally-staged.

By making sure you follow these tips, you’ll be able to boost attendance to your open house events and increase the chance of getting offers as a result.

Looking for a way to keep track of your real estate leads? Find out what iDashboard can do for you.