So, there he was, tooling along in his car with the kids because his wife had suggested he get them out of the house for a while.
Then Tom Dobrez saw the “open house” sign. Although he and his wife had talked about moving, it was still a mere notion at the moment he laid eyes on the sign and then at the house behind it. He and the kids walked through the house. Then he went home and got his wife.
“I knew I wanted it,” Dobrez says. He and his wife made an offer on the house about two weeks after seeing it, and the south suburban house is now their home.
Buyer, seller and and agent all beam. That’s the way open houses are meant to work. And sometimes they do.
But listen to Linda Kamerling, who last year sold her home in Evanston.
“They are just very anxiety-producing,” Kamerling says of the three open houses she endured in the course of selling the the Evanston home. “You feel like you have to make your house more than perfect. I’d start cleaning up the moment I woke up in the morning. You can’t have a fingerprint. You have to have fresh flowers.”
Kamerling’s agent had told her that if she wanted open houses, she would conduct them, but to not be overly optimistic about the results.
“I made myself nuts” getting ready, Kamerling recalls. “And our experience was exactly what our broker predicted”-that it would be her neighbors who would turn out to walk through her home.
Those turnouts were relatively small, and Kamerling’s agent found a buyer elsewhere.
Goals and timing
So, are open houses effective? That may depend on your goals and timing. Statistically, open houses don’t seem to be particularly reliable. A survey by the National Association of Realtors indicated that 6 percent of home buyers in 1993 were introduced to their homes at open houses. Locally, some firms say the number may be closer to 3 percent.
So there’s the paradox: They don’t seem to work especially well, but everybody holds them anyway. On a given Sunday, open house signs are more plentiful than beer cups at Taste of Chicago.
Take, for example, the Real Estate section of a recent Chicago Tribune. An edition that circulates primarily in the city contained no fewer than 242 display ads for open houses being held that day. Those didn’t include ads for builders and developers who staff model homes and condos on an ongoing basis. And if you began counting the open houses in that day’s classified ads, you might get weary, as we did, when the total had reached 233, with several pages still uncounted.
Are open houses worthwhile? Isn’t the competition overwhelming? “I have very good luck with them,” says Mary Sunderland, an agent for Re/Max South Suburban in Flossmoor. “This year alone, I have sold three houses through open houses,” she said in early May. One of those was Dobrez’s. “It’s a good way to reach buyers who maybe don’t want to make a commitment, as far as getting together with a real estate broker and going out and looking. They want to do it on a more casual basis.”
But one of Sunderland’s colleagues in her own office is unconvinced. “In my opinion, open houses do not bring buyers for that particular piece of property,” according to Mike Kroopkin, who has been an agent for about 25 years. “Some (open houses) have some success, but generally speaking, they don’t bring the buyer.
“What (an open house) does do is help the broker get buyers for other properties,” Kroopkin says.
The spillover effect
Sunderland doesn’t disagree that open houses can help find buyers for other properties, but argues that there’s a spillover effect. “I keep a list of people who go to open houses, by price range. I send invitations to all of those people if I have a new house open in their price range,” she says. The theory is that if your neighbor’s open house didn’t find a buyer for him or her, it might turn up one for you.
Indeed, that NAR survey of 1993 buyers said that 40 percent of them did attend open houses-the organization categorizes them as “informational sources”-on the way to finding the home they purchased.
But homeowners must realize that, in this electronic age, there are more informational sources out there than ever before. The multiple listing service, which is widely employed by agents, has been computerized; searches of its data base can be defined as narrowly or as widely as the potential buyer wants. In the hands of an adept agent, those searches may result in fewer trips to homes-including open houses-that are clearly a waste of everybody’s time.
Several agents interviewed for this story said that, although they find open houses to be time-wasters, offering to conduct them is policy at the agencies where they work, so they wouldn’t speak negatively of them for the record.
But the Doubting Thomases cite their weariness with mere lookers, who can’t afford to bid on the houses they visit. Then there are the curious neighbors. One woman, whose house in Chicago’s Edgewater neighborhood has been open repeatedly in the last several months, says she hates coming home to see all the familiar names who have signed in. It’s unlikely that they’re going to rifle though the underwear drawer-indeed, brokers say that pilferage is surprisingly rare-but there’s a sense of exposure that can put teeth on edge.
Displaying a level of optimism that only real estate agents can muster, open-house proponents point out that those neighbors have contacts and relatives who might be buyers and that they can spread the word about your house. If they’re an evil, they’re a necessary one.
10 percent of sales
Mary Beth Bruce, an agent in Villa Park, says she got a lot of reaction when she wrote an essay in support of open houses in a real estate trade magazine last fall. “Brokers either felt I was right on the money and thanked me, or they said, `Are you crazy?,’ ” she explains.
Bruce says that in the last three years, 10 percent of the sales at the agency where she works, J.W. Reedy Realty, have resulted directly from open houses. But she says that some neighborhoods and towns are better for open houses than others. “For instance, I have done them in Hanover Park, and if I got two people, I had a successful open house. (It’s) not an area where people expect to see them,” and hence don’t turn out.
She also says that the outward appearance of the home makes a big difference. “One that has more curb appeal is going to draw more people than a Plain Janer. And one that’s in a more heavily trafficked location will do better.”
Other agents say that they put off holding open houses until a property starts to languish on the market, maybe after a couple of months without much buyer interest.
J.W. Reedy has a monthly “Super Sunday” program with open houses at as many of its listings as possible. Bruce says that potential buyers often come to the company’s office on Wednesdays asking for the list of houses that will be open.
Such a practice may be one indication that open houses are evolving.
Catherine Goy, an agent with Prudential Preferred Properties in Hinsdale who believes “you can’t have enough of them,” is considering hosting open houses on Saturdays because of the volume of telephone inquiries she receives on that day.
In April, Goy and her partner, Jo Lyn Waichulis coordinated efforts with several agencies to open more than 50 homes in Oak Brook one Sunday afternoon. Goy says more than 200 people attended, despite a driving rain.
On the preceding Wednesday, the same Oak Brook houses were open for agents only. Such so-called brokers’ open houses seem to be endorsed even by those agents who have little use for open-to-all events. Usually, brokers invite agents who sell comparably priced properties and would be in contact with qualified buyers. Usually held on weekday afternoons, they sometimes are catered affairs, with hors d’oeuvres and occasionally even a raffle of some desirable item-the idea being to attract successful agents who might otherwise be too busy to attend. Such idylls usually are paid for by the listing agents.
The caravan
A subgroup is the in-house “caravan,” which is a regularly scheduled tour of properties listed by a given agency for that company’s agents only. The idea is to give “family” the first crack at a property.
But one North Side agent says that brokers’ open houses have proliferated to the point that they ace one another out. Agents can’t get to all the ones that probably would be in their interest to see. She explains that she had just mailed or hand-delivered about 500 invitations to a brokers’ open at an upscale home. She hoped 20 would attend, even with the advertised lure of Swedish pastries.
Five came. But (here’s that broker optimism again) one of the five made an appointment on the spot to show the house to a client.
As with all other aspects of the real estate game, whether a property sells via any form of open house might just boil down to intangibles-or even just dumb luck.
“They are a crapshoot,” offers Dobrez, who bought his Flossmoor residence and his previous home through open houses. He likes holding them and attending them, but admits that they defy formularizing. “I don’t think there is any rhyme or reason to why people come on a given day.”
