How the top 3 motivators to holding open houses differs from Suburbia to Beach Town
What do you see when you picture an open house? It probably looks a little something like this: visitors’ cars lining the street, an open house sign with balloons in the front yard, couples roaming about the home, trays of cookies, pitchers of refreshments, and a real estate agent mingling with potential buyers, handing out flyers of information about the listing. To that, I’d say your imagination is pretty accurate. Now take your imagination, pack it in a suitcase, cram it in your trunk, and drive it to Ocean City. Now that you’re in your favorite beach town ever, what do you see when you picture an open house here? Hate to burst your bubble, but… SPLAT.
It looks nothing like what you’re used to. According to NAR’s 2022 trend report, while 41% of buyers attended an open house, only 2% of buyers actually purchased the house they visited. I bet that statistic can be cut at least in half for 2nd home markets like OCMD. Let’s compare some apples to oranges with the top 3 open house motivators.
*Our apple will be 123 Main Street in Suburbia USA, and our orange will be Condo #123 in our beloved Ocean City, MD.
Signs, signs, everywhere there’s signs
🍎 Suburbia, USA
For the week leading up to the open house, signs are posted in the neighborhood to generate interest and spread the word. Joe Schmoe sees them on his way to and from work and tells his wife they should swing by over the weekend. Neighbors tell their friends who have always wanted to move to the same neighborhood. Agents add the stop to their list for the buyers they’re showing around on Saturday. Add some balloons to those signs the day of your open house and you’re golden!
🍊 Ocean City, MD
Hmmm, well you’re not allowed to post signs in OC, and there’s no yard/area in front of the building where you could position a sign – or maybe there is, but chances are the building’s by-laws prohibit advertising of this kind. In fact, most buildings won’t even allow you to post a sign in the elevator or lobby areas to at least advertise the event to current residents and guests–not in advance, and usually not even just the day-of.
80% of Success is Just Showing Up!
🍎 Suburbia, USA
While every Agent’s dream is to have a steady flow of potential buyers visiting his or her open house, the results may vary. But for a standard 2-hour long open house, 10-20 groups would be considered a very successful turnout. Which means 10-20 people the Agent can add to his database. Smashing.
🍊 Ocean City, MD
In Ocean City, attendance is very much influenced by the time of year–but wait, it gets even more complicated than that. Our population is about 7K year-round residents on this little 10.5-mile long island, but during summer weekends, we host up to 345K vacationers. That’s nearly FIFTY TIMES our population. Because of this influx of occupancy, summer open houses benefit from a much larger turnout; however, the unfortunate side effect is that most of these attendees are merely curious passers-by and not real buyers. Winter (or off-season) open houses suffer a reduction of visitors, but the chances of those attendees being serious buyers is higher. This doesn’t sound so bad, though, right? Course not. Until I tell you what the average attendance rate is… a good turnout at a summer open house would be about 5 groups. A good turnout at an off-season open house? Consider yourself lucky if you have one person walk through that door. That’s right. One. Person.
If you’re wondering why–or if you’re a real estate agent in Suburbia USA and you think we surely must be doing something wrong–consider all this:
1) For an in-season open house, most properties are part of a rental program with Saturday turnover, meaning the only chance we have to host an open house is between 10AM and 3PM on a Saturday. And on “Turnover Saturday,” the people we’re targeting are likely to also be arriving or departing that day, and find navigating summer Saturday traffic about as exciting as a root canal–adding even more stops to the day isn’t exactly a high point of interest. Our visitors then have to battle Parking Patrol: the building’s employees who check parking passes to ensure they’re a registered guest of the building; if they are not, they need to find off-site parking nearby and walk to the building (guess how many actually decide do that), otherwise they risk being towed or having their car booted. And yes, that does actually happen. Don’t forget, we also needs to arrange with the property’s housekeeper to prioritize the cleaning of the condo after the rental guest has checked out, to ensure it will be ready before the open house begins.
If the property isn’t a rental, then you don’t have most of these problems, you say? Sure, sure. We can certainly hold open houses during the week in properties that aren’t rentals, so we have less of the Turnover Battle with time constraints, traffic, and cleaning. Guess how many serious buyers take off a day in the middle of their work week to travel 3 or so hours each way just to attend a single open house? I’ll wait while you count those unicorns.
2) Ah, but off-season open houses must be where all the action is! Sorry, but nope. We struggle even more with off-season open houses, to be honest. If the success of an open house is measured by the number of attendees, off-season ones are often a bust. And when I say “bust,” I mean no one showed up. The other times, we had one visitor. Two or more people? That was a banger of an open house. But even though I did say these attendees have a higher likelihood of being serious buyers, at least 50% of the time they’re actually just neighbors in the area who saw the open house sign when walking the dog that morning or coming back from their morning Dunkin run. (For those lucky locations where we’re at least allowed to put out a sign the day of the open house.) It’s also the same struggle as those mid-week summer open houses: how many people make a day-trip to OC on a winter weekend just to visit an open house or two? These aren’t necessarily unicorns, but they’re at least an Ili pika.
The Truth in Advertising
🍎 Suburbia, USA
Get the word out there! In addition to decorating the streets with signs the week leading up to the open house, Agents have the world at their fingertips with Facebook. Facebook ads allow Agents to advertise directly to potential buyers in the area, and it even allows them to push a Facebook reminder notification to them the day of the event. This is a great way to get the listing in front of potentials buyers, even if they can’t attend the open house. Agents are able to hyper-target their audiences through location, age, and interest filters, to ensure their ads are getting in front of the users most likely to have an interest in their listing.
🍊 Ocean City, MD
We’ve already discussed how we can’t post signs around town (total bummer, but we get it). And while our open houses do syndicate to public listing sites like Zillow (yuck) and Realtor.com, that’s about where it stops. Sure, we can email our leads lists, but email is honestly the lowest form of communication and, as a marketing service, it should only be a small slice of a much larger pie. But you can run Facebook ads, right? Nope. When putting together a Facebook ad, you define what city or cities you wish to target–meaning you’re targeting people who currently live in that specific city. Our buyers don’t live here… in the last 6 months alone, buyers of Ocean City real estate live in 340+ different cities. Our audience simply isn’t target-able.
Open Houses used to be the easiest (and only) way a potential buyer could preview a home without an Agent–back when listings could only have a handful of bad quality pictures at best. But now we have stunning photography, amazing videos, and immersive virtual tours; buyers don’t necessarily need open houses to get a better feel for a property these days. And for people who live hours away from the location of their future beach home, open houses aren’t even on their radar anymore.
But in Suburbia USA, open houses really do work–maybe not to sell houses, per se, but that hasn’t been the reason for hosting open houses for a long, long time. The internet changed all of that for us. What open houses do now is connect people. In all honesty, more than anything, they serve the agent, not the seller; they bring an influx of unrepresented buyers right to their doorstep- er, right to their client’s doorstep, but you know what I mean. The Agent can add a dozen or so quality buyers to his database in just a couple of hours. But that’s just not the case for us here at the beach, and I believe it’s important for Agents and Sellers to realistically manage these expectations.
So you’re probably thinking, Grant, your team hosts open houses all the time. Why do it if they don’t work? You’re absolutely right. We hold open houses as often as possible, because whether the person walking through that door is a summer lookie-loo or a winter neighbor, a bored beachgoer on a rainy day or a parent waiting for his daughter’s dance troupe to go on stage at the Convention Center in the middle of January–it’s still eyes on the listing and feet through the door, no matter how few. Our Sellers deserve every possible effort in selling their beach home, and while I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve sold a listing to someone who attended my open house, in all my decades of doing real estate, that’s one handful of deals my sellers may otherwise never have gotten.
For more information about open-houses, or anything beach related, give us a call. We'd love to help with your next real estate need.
Grant Fritschle 410-430-5880
Jon Barker 410-935-3810
#OpenHousesOceanCity #OceanCityMDOpenHouse #TopAgentOceanCity #BestAgentsAtTheBeach
#OceanCityRealEstateExperts