6 Foolproof Tips for Promoting Your Open House in 2022

As a real estate agent, you might have been misled into believing open houses are obsolete, owing to today’s age of social media and online marketing. This article is here to convince you that while online marketing is certainly all the rage, don’t fret, because real estate marketing via open houses has evolved accordingly!

These 6 brand-new tips for promoting your listing are bound to change your mind.

1.  The combination sucker-punch: social media and traditional marketing

You read that right. Nothing like the best of both worlds!

You can harness the twin powers of social media and good old-fashioned open house marketing to make your open house a resounding success.

One option which is bound to make your listing an attractive stop is to create eye-catching flyers advertising it. And no need to hire a graphic designer for this, either, because you can create your own high quality real estate flyer templates through a user-friendly service like PosterMyWall!

Once that is done, you can then throw your sucker-punch by posting these flyers on social media (Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, etc.), and utilizing flyer boxes at the venue to distribute prints of the same flyers.

Hold the door open, because those buyers are going to be positively rolling in.

2.  Turn the open ‘house’ into an open ‘home’

The best way to make your open house a success is to make visitors stick around, and to make your listing stick in their minds. The best way to do that is to make the house feel as close to a home as possible. Nobody’s immune to a bit of white picket charm!

A few tips to get you started:

• Keep a few snacks and drinks on hand, preferably tagged with your contact details. A happy tummy instantly triggers happy connections with the open house.
• Bake some cookies! This OG tip not only ignites an immediate sense of home (a la grandma’s house), but research from Harvard Business Review suggests “…scent can play a role in making a more powerful impression on your customers”, since they will now associate the scent of cookies baking with your listing.
• Pipe some atmospheric music through the house. There are many ready-made playlists available on YouTube and streaming platforms, which you can use to add a chill homely vibe to the event.
• Apart from consumable items, invest in some more durable, useful items, such as high quality key chains, pens, notebooks, and mugs. Visitors will tend to keep these for longer as opposed to perishable items.

3.  When the world goes virtual, so should you!

Many times, people are unable or unwilling to physically show up to open houses. This is especially true of today, what with COVID-19 terrorizing folks with vulnerable immune systems.

Rise to the occasion by providing a virtual walkthrough tour option for your open house.

You can either go live on Facebook or YouTube, or post on Instagram stories. Record yourself walking through each room, commenting on the various features and utilities of your listing.

This tip is exceptionally useful because it makes your potential buyer list virtually endless (pun unintended), something a traditional open house could never be able to achieve.

4.  Distinguish yourself from other agents

There’s no use vamping up your open house if you don’t actively try to differentiate from other listings within the area. Who cares about your cookies if someone’s baking a batch in the next block, too?

Ingrain the uniqueness of your listing into visitors’ minds by having a list of major benefits it has over other houses in the area.

Do you offer extra square footage? Is it a corner house? Can buyers expect a uniquely beautiful view?

Choose three to four of these ‘perks’ to make sure they stick in potential buyers’ minds when they are comparing similar properties. Then, sit back, relax, and don’t be surprised when you witness hordes of returning customers!

5.  Courtesy Marketing – take advantage of ‘nosey’ neighbors

Real estate agent Bret Parsons came up with this genius innovation to harness the naturally inquisitive tendency of neighbors into an opportunity to increase traffic at your open house.

The idea is not to invite your neighbors to the event, but to instead let them know that there will be some congestion in the area at a particular time, owing to an open house you are hosting.

This nifty tactic has twin benefits: neighbors don’t feel like they are being ‘sold’ to, and their ‘nosey’ side kicks in; they must find out what’s going on in the area. Voila: free traffic for you!

6.  Close the marketing loop – follow up!

Hook, line, and sinker. You’ve managed the hook and the line, but don’t forget the most important bit!

You can always use your own intuition to gauge which visitors seemed like serious buyers, by carefully observing actions. Relevant questions about the listing, decent time spent engaging with the event, and even the relations visitors bring (spouses, kids) can aid your decision to follow up.

But let’s face it: it’s 2022. An AI could do that for you, and better. These use algorithms to predict which visitors are likely to enter into talks about buying ages before human agents can.

So go ahead and look into a predictive analysis app and close that deal like a pro.

Conclusion

Now that we have discussed these 6 top-notch, brand spanking new marketing tactics that combine social media, traditional marketing, and human psychology, for promoting your open house, your job is to take the real estate market by storm and show all of those agents what real real estate marketing is.