Boost 10x the ROI of Open Houses

Here are a few tips Real Estate professionals or even Home owners can use to boost the Return on Investment of their Open House

Most of the Real Estate professionals I meet tell me that the Return on Investment of their Open House is extremely low. They spend 1 to 2 hours to organize it, 3 to 4 hours to receive potential clients, 1 to 2 hours to update the contact information into their CRM, and it is not a given that interesting leads come from the event.

Well, here are a few tips that we learned from experience in organizing Open Houses:

Hire a professional to shoot pictures, 360 pictures, and / or video tour

It seems obvious that to sell a property pictures are key. Buyers need to picture themselves in the place quickly to have a chance to close. But today, it is a basic standard to show pictures of a house for sale. Using relatively basic technology, you will allow your potential buyers to see every room in 360 degrees, and even to do a "virtual tour" of the place. You can use for example Google StreetView to do it yourself. But we highly recommend to hire a professional to do it for you. The pictures in 360 will be smoother, and they can usually program a "Virtual Tour" for you on their website. See an example here. It is relatively cheap for the result (~$300). It makes a significant difference. We will call that the WAOUH effect. Potential buyers or fellow Real Estate professionals are much more likely to come to your Open House if they see the potential of your listing.

Be ready. And stand out.

You don't want to miss the emotional buyer. The one that pictured himself in his new home from the porch.

Unless you are in Chelsea in Manhattan, chances are the leads visiting your property will also visit other places. Do not take any chance of losing anybody because you did not know what are the best PK schools in the area, or if there are good restaurants around. Have a recap of your listing printed and hand it over to the people interested. Have your business cards ready. Talk about all the recent sales in the area. Be prepared.

Per the NAR, they are more than 1.3 million of Real Estate professionals. It is also a good idea to be as professional as you can be for your clients.

Advertise tip#1: use the right social media

Still per the NAR, two third of Real Estate professionals have their own website. Promoting your listing in the local MLS, and on your website is really basic. If you don't have a website on your own, don't have one built just for your listing. Nobody will see it unless you give them the exact web address.

Use social media to promote your new listings, but only if you have time. Posting a random link with a picture on your Facebook will do nothing but appear on the feed of 80–100 people of your own average network. Use professional pictures, thoughtful hashtags, and the right wording : Location, #beds, #baths, ideal for families / couple, budget.

Not all social medias have the same impact. Linkedin is generally useless unless you promote it, while Instagram lets you showcase your listing.

Advertise tip #2: invite the right people

Unless you only want to show the property to neighbors and local curious, you need to invite leads to your Open House. Choose the right leads to invite. For instance the fellow realtors that previously sold the same type of apartment in the area. Or potential buyers who contacted before, with the right budget.

Inviting the right contacts to visit the place will increase 5x your chance of actual visits.

How to invite them? By email? Call? Text message?

To maximize the chance to have the right people passing the entry door, you need to aim at the right balance between volume and personalization. If you invite the entire Californian Real Estate industry to a showing in San Diego, you will not have a good return. And if you call every single contacts potentially interested, you will spend so much time that there will be no point of organizing an Open House.

We recommend using a combination of Text message and email. Preferably personalized with the names of your contacts. Let them know that you are showing a house that they are interested in 10 days from now by email. Invite them to RSVP (give you an answer) by Text 5 days before the event. And send reminders 1 day or a few hours before the showing.

If you don't know what provider to use to send those invitations, try our website ushouldcome.

Make it public (in the real life)

The NAR (again) states that 7% of purchases were triggered by Open House or outside signs.

We highly recommend to invest 1h to get an outside sign showing the neighborhood that you are organizing an Open House. This takes only a few minutes to install. No need to pass on that.

Use technology to get the data of your visitors

Now that you have potential buyers arriving, it is time to get their contact information. Whether you invited them or not, you need to know who to follow-up with.

You can use several solutions to get this data. A simple piece of paper will do. But to minimize the time spent by both your visitors and yourself afterwards, you can use online forms, and an iPad. At ushouldcome, we are actually testing our solution to allow our clients to build their contact form, and to synchronize automatically the new data with their contact lists on ushouldcome. I'm told it should be live on our website by May'19 ;)

Follow-up

I don't know any Real Estate professionals who does not follow-up in a timely manner with qualified leads. But just in case. Don't forget to follow-up with the people who came to your Open House! It will allow you to update your contact database for your next Open House. Or for your monthly newsletters.

Don't hesitate if you have other tips to share.