Open House As A Marketing Strategy

When selling your home, holding an open house can be a valuable marketing effort. It permits families to come in, experience the home, ask questions, peer into the rooms and generally get a feel of the place. Typically a real estate agent prefers not to have the seller present during an open house, but you can prepare the home to enhance a potential home buyers interest and use the opportunity to gain valuable input, opinions and suggestions on how to improve the presentation of your home to increase potential buyer interest.

The Hook to Pull Buyers In.

When you have an open house the challenge is to attract the buyer so that they get out of their car and come in to your home. The entrance and view from the street gives the first impression so this is where you should pay special care. Get yourself a clipboard and notebook and go and stand outside, opposite your home. Give it a thorough critical assessment, writing down all the items that could be improved or neatened up. Then drive around your suburb, look at houses and take note of what particularly attracts your attention. Chances are the same things will attract your potential buyer. You may need to do this exercise a few times. Eventually you’ll have a list of what pulls you to a house. Examine your list. Then think of ways to implement those points in your entrance.

An immaculate front garden is a big attraction. Use flowers to draw the eye up to the house. Place pots of flowers near the door or leading up along the pathway. Remember you are engaged in a marketing activity. Perhaps you can install an inexpensive water feature so the sound of burbling water is the first thing your customer hears. Maybe hang a wind chime in a strategic place. You want ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ as the customer sits in his car deciding whether or not to come in.

The Inside – Using the Five Senses.

People are use to clean, neat shopping experiences at the mall. That same mentality can be used to your advantage. In real life, most available surfaces in ones home have things on them. In the marketing world however, bare surfaces with a single rose in a glass vase or a large fruit bowl filled with cherries is the order of the day. For open day, scoop all your homely nick knacks into boxes and put them away in the cupboard. Tidy and dust. You want your customer to run their finger tips over the kitchen counters pull open the oven door or touch the wallpaper – all these actions keep the potential buyer in your house absorbing the atmosphere.

Think of what you’d feel about a house if you arrived as a potential buyer and there were pockets of clutter and a general air of disarray. We as busy people may sometimes live like that but we certainly don’t buy in that environment. Just have a look through the glossy magazines showing homes - nothing out of place. Everything is all neat and tidy. That’s the way we want them to look. We all know that never in a month of Sundays do real lived-in houses look like that but this is marketing. When you are holding an open house you are busy creating an illusion.

Continue that make-believe by using essential oils in burners to keep a special fragrance wafting through the rooms. Lemon grass or vanilla are both good choices. The sense of smell is a powerful memory invoker. With an open house you are building a memory in the buyer. You want to access all the senses.

Depending on your market, play background music to suit that market. Again, it’s the “shopping at the mall” experience you’re plugging into. Have you ever walked around an open house where everything was still and quiet? You felt uncomfortable talking in a normal voice because things were so hushed. Were you relaxed? No? Then your customer will probably feel the same. Have some music playing quietly. Your intention is to keep your buyers strolling about the place. Then when they have returned home, your house is not just a blur among the five others that the family looked at that day.

The Survey.

Obtaining feedback from people touring your home must be made easy and simple. Leave survey forms and encourage your Realtor to solicit comment. Offer coffee or juice. Let them put the survey into a box. People are much more inclined to tell the truth if they know they can pop the survey into a box, rather than hand it to a Realtor where the agent can immediately read what's's written like “The green bathroom’s awful!”

Preparing a home for an open day is a lot of work. It’s marketing and public relations all rolled into one. However it does test how much interest is out there and provides valuable feed back from the exact market you’re trying to attract. If every survey mentions the green bathroom, in an unflattering way, you know it needs immediate attention. By using the open house strategy you’ll soon have a clear idea of what’s important to your buyers. If you concentrate on those points you can improve your chances of a quicker sale at a higher price.

Attention Realtors: Please do not republish this article on your website or blog. If you would like content for your readers we will consider writing a unique article for your website upon request. Click here for more information.