Selling Your Home? Should You Have A Public Open House?

One of the staples of real estate marketing in Darien and everywhere else for that matter is the ubiquitous Sunday open house. Every listing gets one or more during its time on the market, and the papers and Internet are full of them. But do they really work? Well, it depends on what you mean by "work." Over the past 11 years, I've personally only seen open houses sell a  specific property a handful of times.

Open houses usually draw a cross section of people from nosy neighbors to those just sticking their toe in the real estate market waters. And if you're dealing with a high end marketplace such as Greenwich or Darien, I believe they are an outright waste of everyone's time. Buyers looking for three-, four- or five-million-dollar properties rarely drop out of the sky or find themselves trolling the Internet for open houses.

For those types of properties, I'd conduct an exclusive, public showing, by invitation  only or perhaps conduct an evening event inviting other brokerages from neighboring towns. In this market, time is better spent exposing the property to agents who have high-end clients than perfect strangers who may just be looking for kitchen remodeling ideas.

If your home is not in the real estate stratosphere, and if the open house isn't terribly inconvenient for you, the go ahead. But as they say in golf ... it's not the percentage shot.

This post won't make me popular among my fellow realtors but it could save you and me both, several, undisturbed Sunday afternoons.