Alas, not every visitor to BloodhoundBlog has the sublime gifts to preen at length about the salutary benefits of a carefully-cultivated humility. Some people, oddly enough, come here to learn about real estate. From my email:
I’ve been looking at your listing/marketing process, and am curious about your open house strategy. You comment something to the effect that you hold opens every week because a) you have the time with only really salable listings and b) there are lots of unrepresented buyers out there.
We’re probably a little more old school that you, but we try to not be “lazy, stupid and cheap.” We try to price realistically, and we try to promote our opens energetically. Sometimes we get a lot of traffic, but sometimes we don’t (FWIW, we’ve got just over 12 months of inventory right now, and falling, but still very high prices). Is your market way different from ours? Do you get lots of traffic all the time, or is it hit and miss? Just curious.
Here’s the thing, and I guess I can’t say this enough: We don’t do anything the way other Realtors do it. Many of our ideas are original to us, things we worked out on our own. But many others are tactics that we have heard about from other agents. These ideas we Bloodhoundize, a process I’ve talked about before. We strip the idea down to its essence, then rebuild it from the ground up our way, so that the fundamental marketing objectives don’t get lost in the shuffle.
What could be more ordinary than a Realtor holding an open house? Here is our policy on open houses from ABetterListing.com:
We hold Open Houses every week until the home is sold. Why? Because there are an awful lot of un- or under-represented buyers out there, and we want for them to be able to see our home. We avoid dual agency, but we have no problem showing the home to buyers who accidentally left their buyer’s agents at home. If a listing is near the commuter traffic flow — and most of ours are — we like to hold after-work Open Houses, too, just to see if we can snag people sick of driving. We hold Open Houses to sell the house — everything we’re talking about here is about selling the house — but we have met a lot of very interesting people at Open House. Sellers come to check us out, of course, and we meet a few buyers. But we also get to become acquainted with fascinating people who love our houses and know a ton about them. Countless times we have gained access to historic photos of our listings because someone wanted to see what had become of their old home.
I’d have to check the records to be sure, but I know we’ve sold at least four of our listings to people who first visited the home at open house. I can think of at least four more near misses. The notion that houses don’t sell from being held open is a self-fulfilling prophesy. We know that our way, at least, of holding homes open sells houses.
So what do we do?
First, we rarely do open houses in cookie-cutter tract home neighborhoods. The ideas I’m talking about here work best in historic, architecturally-distinctive or luxury homes. In a plain-vanilla tract home subdivision, we might be able to draw traffic to an after-work open house, but we don’t do well at getting people to show up on weekends.
When we launch a listing, we do a huge promotion of the open house. We will distribute between 1,000 and 5,000 business-card-sized invitations. These go to the immediate neighborhood and to appropriate move-up neighborhoods for that home.
Because of those invitations, the first week or two of open houses can draw huge crowds. Fewer than 50 parties on the first Sunday is a huge disappointment, and more than 100 parties is not uncommon for an extraordinary home.
Aren’t these people all just “looky-loos”? Of all the many ways Realtors are outrageously dumb, expressing contempt for the consumer is the dumbest. Yes, some of the people who come are just looking. And some of them end up buying anyway. And some of the others call their friends and tell them to run right down to see our house. And some of them become our clients for life. All kinds of wonderful things can happen at an open house — if you approach it as an opportunity and not a burden.
Our sign riders and our invitations specify a start time but no end time for the open house. The first week, we could have three or more people in the house for five or six hours. The second week might be one or two people for two hours or more. If we don’t do another round of invitations, by the third week we could have one person in the house for 90 minutes or less. We always stay for at least an hour, but we don’t waste our time if there is no traffic.
It’s important to be there every week, though, because the people who buy at open house will keep coming back until they have made themselves completely crazy over the home. This is hardly surprising, if you think about it: It’s how everything sells at retail.
We don’t do dual agency, but we understand that buyers are going to show up without buyer’s agents. Our job is to sell the home, and weekly open houses, well promoted, work amazingly well.
In individual posts, I will talk about particular marketing tactics, and ABetterListing.com is devoted to a full-blown marketing strategy. But the essence of the Bloodhound way of thinking about real estate marketing is a matter of philosophy — although it’s a pretty obvious philosophy.
Like this: The top secret MLS system resulted in an industry full of Realtors who are completely clueless about marketing. We thought our job was keeping secrets from our clients, then torquing them into bad deals with elaborate closing techniques. Our actual job, at least as listing agents, is MARKETING REAL PROPERTY. How do you do that? The same way you market anything else: Make it appealing. Make it available. Make it known.
We’re not trying to be like other Realtors. The very thought makes my skin crawl: We’re trying in every way we can think of not to be like other Realtors. But here’s what we are doing: We’re trying to think and perform and produce results like other marketers. Our belief, borne out by rapid sales in a market where nothing is selling, is that, by approaching real estate marketing problems from that point of view, we will achieve better, more profitable results.
Technorati Tags: BloodhoundBlog Unchained, real estate, real estate marketing, real estate training
Teri Lussier says:
There are so many generous take-aways you’ve shared in this post, but here’s my favorite:
>We strip the idea down to its essence, then rebuild it from the ground up our way, so that the fundamental marketing objectives don’t get lost in the shuffle.
I know you have marketing experience, but is there a place you return time and again for inspiration?
My other question: Good ideas and bad ideas. This bites me in the butt over and over. My brain is great at generating ideas, not so great at knowing what makes an idea great. Something new or different is not always better (I need to have that tattooed on the inside of my eyelids). The million dollar question: How do you know?
September 12, 2008 — 6:38 am
Cyndee Haydon says:
Greg – loved hearing about your Open House ideas – doing them for “unique” homes makes a lot of sense. We do find Open Houses for cookie cutter homes typically only yield 1 potential buyer and 1-2 neighbors in a 4 hour period – which makes weekly events not the best use of resources and time!
September 12, 2008 — 6:39 am
Greg Swann says:
> We do find Open Houses for cookie cutter homes typically only yield 1 potential buyer and 1-2 neighbors in a 4 hour period – which makes weekly events not the best use of resources and time!
One thing that might help in that circumstance is to set a time limit at both ends. Make the rider say, “Open House, Sunday, 2 – 2:45 pm.” That limits your time in the house, and it also puts visitors on notice that they have to come on time or they won’t get to see the house. If you get a few parties at once, you’ll get a few more by accretion: Nothing draws a crowd like a crowd. If you have more than one house in the neighborhood, the 15 minutes will give you time to move your directionals and open the next house.
September 12, 2008 — 6:48 am
Cyndee Haydon says:
Greg – great twist – thanks for getting me to think outside my “open house box” today – 🙂 Sounds like we may be missing some good opportunities – this is the beauty of reading blogs by so many different REALTORS. Have a good one!
September 12, 2008 — 6:53 am
Greg Swann says:
>> We strip the idea down to its essence, then rebuild it from the ground up our way, so that the fundamental marketing objectives don’t get lost in the shuffle.
> I know you have marketing experience, but is there a place you return time and again for inspiration?
Richard Riccelli. I pay careful attention to everything Richard says, and I got to do part of the grunt work on his projects for almost ten years. One day he was exercised with me over work I had done badly. On the phone he said, “Where’s my added value?” I have thought for years about that question. If I die a wealthy man, it will be because of those four words. Everything we do as Realtors, but especially as listers, is a reflection of those four words.
> My other question: Good ideas and bad ideas. This bites me in the butt over and over. My brain is great at generating ideas, not so great at knowing what makes an idea great. Something new or different is not always better (I need to have that tattooed on the inside of my eyelids). The million dollar question: How do you know?
This is post by itself, I think. Look for it at the top of the blog.
September 12, 2008 — 7:28 am
Teri L says:
Revisiting open houses again.
I love the “buy me”. It makes me giggle, here’s why- don’t try to fool me about what you are doing. You are selling a house. Just say so. Cut to the damn chase already.
Thinking out loud:
a) I’m working with and looking for mostly buyers.
b) Most agents do not want to hold opens.
c) I’ve never had an agent not let me hold their listing open.
d) Open houses can be a great way to get belly-to-belly with people who are either really looking, or really love homes. Either way, it’s me in front of an audience of targeted and eager folks. Now what? And that’s what I’m trying to make the most of.
What, if any, kind of follow-up do you do? Do you have sign-in registry? I can’t see you and Cathy going about this in the usual way.
January 3, 2009 — 9:19 am
Teri L says:
oops. wrong post. “buy me” was here: https://www.bloodhoundrealty.com/BloodhoundBlog/?p=4885
January 3, 2009 — 9:24 am
Greg Swann says:
> Either way, it’s me in front of an audience of targeted and eager folks. Now what? And that’s what I’m trying to make the most of.
We don’t work buyers as buyers at Open House, so I’m talking in a more general way. At our Open Houses, we represent the seller only, so working the buyers as buyers would be an agency violation — the betrayal of the seller’s interests. Our objective with buyers is and must be to sell that home only, so we don’t probe them with buyers’ questions. On the other hand, I will work very hard with the neighbors as listing candidates, since that’s why they’re there, and since this is not a betrayal of the seller’s interests.
This is a good reason to let agents from other brokerages hold a home Open, since they don’t have a fiduciary relationship with our seller. We’re not so busy that we need to worry about this right now, but it’s something we’ve done in the past.
As for your, “Now what?” — I think I want to make that a separate post. One of the sessions I’d like to do at Unchained is The Art of Hanging Loose — how to push the product without coming across as a pushy salesperson. I have a lot of fun at Open Houses because I just hang out and schmooze with people. But this is still a matter of Schmoozing By Objectives — closing on value, closing on scarcity, closing on urgency, etc.
> What, if any, kind of follow-up do you do? Do you have sign-in registry? I can’t see you and Cathy going about this in the usual way.
And that’s where I fall apart. Cathy keeps a visitor’s registry and makes follow-up calls, but I almost never do this.
One thing we’re always interested in: Repeat visitors. A second visit is always a buying sign. A third visit is the semaphore of obsession, the ultimate buying sign. It is now our job to identify the killer objections and get rid of them. The buyer is nuts for the house, but there is something impeding the purchase. Find out what it is and make it go away and you’ve sold the home.
My thinking is that people who say houses don’t sell at Open House have never really learned how to sell. If you show enough houses — or if buyers look at enough houses — you or they will get to a house with no deal-killers. But when you’re representing a house, you can’t sell it until a buyer shows up who has no killer objections, or until you as the salesperson unearth and address those objections with buyers who are not all the way in love with your listing. If you’re not doing the latter, you probably won’t have much success selling your listings at Open House.
Thanks for making me revisit this. I think you brought out a lot more than was in the original post.
January 3, 2009 — 1:54 pm
Sean Purcell says:
Great stuff Greg. If possible, can you summarize what you have found to be the most common objection you encounter with buyers on your Open Houses and how you preempt it?
January 3, 2009 — 2:37 pm
Greg Swann says:
> If possible, can you summarize what you have found to be the most common objection you encounter with buyers on your Open Houses and how you preempt it?
Price, of course, but price is, at least potentially, a mask for misperceived value. If you can establish the value of non-fungible factors, then you can negotiate price with something other than numbers.
After price, the most common objections concern factors that may or may not be correctable. We use the Virtual Remodeling feature of Obeo’s virtual tours on any home we list where remodeling could be a plausible objection. Then we always talk about that feature, when we have a chance to talk to buyers or their agents, because it builds in the wish-book factor for the web site.
But there’s more: If remodeling turns out to be an objection, you have to get the buyer talking about trade-offs. If they can satisfy more of their needs for the same money in another house, you probably can’t win. But if the non-fungible factors are pulling the cart, then a discussion of how to make this house a better fit to the buyer can bear fruit. Even then, they have to have the money after COE, of course.
A third one we see a lot is just timing, and there’s not a lot you can do about that. We had a lady who would have bought Joe Strummer’s house if she could have. She came back every time we held the house Open. But her home was being condemned by the City for the Trolley line, and another buyer came along before the City could set a closing date for her house. In cases like that, where a transaction is impractical at the time, there’s not telling if it might have worked out later.
If you can get people to talk to you, you can get down to their real objection — which might be the forth or fifth one they name. But once you dig up the actual objection, you can try to figure out what could swing the balance. The answer may turn out to be that nothing can make a difference, but you can’t know that until you smoke out the objection that really matters to the buyer.
January 3, 2009 — 5:38 pm