Happy Mother’s Day to all of the Oakland County (and farther afield) mothers out there. Gloomy as our weather here may be, I hope it is a special day for all.
We’ll now return to our regularly scheduled real estate discussions. There is a Mother’s Day tie-in since today is Sunday, open house day across America.
Recently, on one of the many listing appointments we were on in the last month, a seller asked me about our planned schedule for doing open houses at his home. Somehow, in my presentation on how the lion’s share of buyers are searching the Internet for homes and that our marketing strategy offers about the best Internet marketing available to home sellers in the Metro Detroit area, I left off the basics about open houses.
Open houses are old school…
The number one thing open houses do is give the Realtor access to potential buyers… of other people’s houses. Afterall, the people who come through open houses typically don’t even know the price of the home they are coming into, so they are not qualified buyers. Often they are curious neighbors or people who just like to check out decorating styles. Yes, some are qualified buyers, but it 8 years of holding what seems like close to a thousand open houses, we have sold exactly 2 of the homes we were in from the effort That makes the odds pretty low.
My time marketing your home can be better spent than holding it open
You are better off with me spending 3 hours getting great pictures, building a virtual tour, building a web site for your home and syndicating your home to all of the sites we use. Actually all that takes a lot longer than 3 hours, but we see a higher payoff from the efforts. We are contacted by QUALIFIED buyers and their agents. The buyers have seen about 25 photos of your home, so they have a good sense of what they are getting into before they even cross the threshold.
If open houses are central to your agent’s strategy to sell your home, you either have a very special situation (I can’t imagine what it is, but I will leave room for the possibility) or your agent might be without better tools in his home marketing toolkit.
Written by Maureen Francis
SKBK Sotheby's International Realty, 248.430.4450
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