What is an open house?
Open house or open doors in Spanish, is a marketing technique that was invented in the United States to teach a home to potential buyers.
But you may wonder where the novelty of the “affair” is, right? In Spain, France or Italy we have been selling real estate for decades simply by showing it to the prospective buyer, but if you look closely, you will see that the key to these traditional sales visits is very different from the central key of American open house:
• In traditional visits:
The prospective buyer makes an appointment with the seller of the property to visit it at a given day and time.
• In open house visits or open days:
The buyer does not have to arrange any kind of prior appointment or reservation to visit the house. The house is open to the public for a whole day, the event is publicized and the open house agency takes care of showing the property to the public throughout the day and taking care that the property does not suffer any type of damage or deterioration.
But an estate agent knows very well that the strategy is not as simple as it seems and not all owners know what an open house is, with so much detail to be successful. That is, you have to know how to do it professionally. We see it in the following sections.
How to make and organize an open house event?
Almost everyone knows how to do it, but almost nobody knows how to organize an open house in such a way that it gets the expected results in the short term. To do it successfully, you have to follow a series of steps, strategic phases well organized and coordinated by a professional.
The most important general phases that you have to remember are the following:
1. The conditioning of the house:
The first step – and the fundamental one – that we have to comply with before opening the doors of our home to any visitor is to condition it so that it looks its best. This basic conditioning does not only consist of thoroughly cleaning furniture, floors, walls, doors, etc.
It may also be necessary to redistribute furniture, place some lamps in strategic locations, replace old curtains with modern blinds, etc.
Who can help us give that touch of makeup to our property?
The work team of an open house real estate agency with extensive experience in this type of sales strategies.
2. Sensory marketing:
Once the house we are going to put on sale is cleaned and refurbished, it is time to go one step further: prepare the different sensory marketing actions that we will put into practice during the open house.
Sensory marketing is a strategy that tries to influence the will of the buyer through different and complementary visual, olfactory, auditory and tactile stimuli.
How to make an open house taking advantage of sensory marketing?
Of many and varied more or less subtle forms: preparing bread in the oven or coffee in the coffee machine and letting the aroma seep through the house, serving refreshing drinks if it is very hot that day, placing soft carpets in the corridors of the housing, aromatizing the garden with fresheners of freshly cut grass, setting the room with a soft and relaxing music, etc.
3. The perfect day:
To know how to make an open house of success, choose well the day to do the day of open doors.
This point will depend a lot on the place where you have the house for sale, the season of the year in which you need to sell, etc.,
Within your possibilities remember to choose a day that is Saturday, festive or work within a traditional bridge.
And of course, whenever possible, with no forecast of rain, storms, snow, etc.
4. Customer service:
For your day to be successful, you have to make the people you visit feel, cared for and informed.
That a visitor gets a good impression does not mean that he will buy, but he will speak very well.
Ideas for an open house
As we told you at the beginning of this article, the open house strategy has gone strong in our country. Now we no longer find a single real estate developer to develop open house techniques in our city, but several. And here, being original is the key to getting visits. For this, you can apply ideas such as the following:
1. Open digital house:
The work can be done face-to-face: attending clients in their own home for sale
Remotely: preparing a virtual tour and putting it at the free disposal of the future buyer through: Internet.
2. Open house television:
One of the ideas for an innovative open house is to put a television channel dedicated to showing homes.
These are raging in countries where people have little time and can not travel personally to visit real estate.
It is one more way to take advantage of all the current advantages of the technologies of image and sound.
3. Open house animated:
The formula of the traditional open house is to organize a day of open doors in which the buyers accede freely.
The owners of the property are usually absent leaving the information work to a good open house real estate.
Visitors access an empty home, without the soul and aromas of a happily inhabited home.
How to animate that empty shell?
Launching one with actors that interact with housing: young people watching television in the living room, parents cooking, …
It is not very seen in Spain, but it goes back to the meaning: what is an open house.
And up to here some of the ideas for an open house have you already done some in your area? What do you think of this strategy? We await your opinion in the comments of the real estate blog. You are the one who can best tell us what strategies work in your area.
Source: INMOGESCO
