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Walter S. Sanford has been a top REALTOR® for more than 28 years (some say “The Best”). He has written 12 books on real estate production for top producers. He's also available for all your real estate events as a keynote, speaker, and trainer. Walter can be reached at 815/929-9258; at 559 S. Washington Ave., Kankakee, Illinois 60901; at walter@waltersanford.com; or at waltersanford.com.
Want selling and marketing advice? Send your questions for Walter Sanford to salesclinic@realtors.org
For More Info:To learn more about open houses, visit our Personal Marketing Toolkit " /> . For registered users of Realtor.org, formerly OneRealtorPlace.
Related Articles:
Stay Safe, Leslie Cummings, April 2001.
Open House: Who's Liable for a Visitor's Injury?, Walt Abro, February 1998.
Seven Tips for Showing Properties in the Dead of Winter , Christina Hoffmann-Spira, February 1996.
Previously by Walter Sanford:
Humanizing Your Website
Don't Let Old Acquaintances Be Forgot
Realistic Prices in a Declining Market
| | Get around
The 15-Minute Open House Tour
An open house tour of several neighboring properties give homes maximum exposure with less effort on your part.
BY WALTER SANFORD
I never liked open houses. I felt they were too slow, and I couldn’t control the quality of visitor I had to wear a smile for. Still, sellers wanted open houses. So I devised a system to make them fun, profitable, and effective.
I call it the 15-minute open house, and I’ve been refining the concept with my students for 15 years. Basically, it involves taking buyers through a rapid-fire series of home showings. Here’s how it works.
Assemble a group of no more than eight properties. Make sure all the homes have something in common, for example, the price range, size, or location within a local historic district. Try to keep them within a mile of one another. (If you don’t have enough listings, work with colleagues to put together an in-house listing tour.)
Advise the sellers that you’d like to place a sign in their yard announcing the event and ask them whether they’d prepare refreshments for guests. Tell them you expect up to 100 visitors but that everyone will be in and out within 15–20 minutes. Also, mention that a lender will be present to prequalify buyers.
Enlist the help of a lender you regularly work with, explaining the great potential the 15-minute open house offers for meeting potential customers. Suggest that the lender bring a laptop to prequalify people. You can also ask for the lender’s help in preparing a joint ad that will run a week before the event.
For example: Walter Sanford of Sanford Systems and Ron Hubbard of Express Mortgage announce a real estate event. Eight homes in the Riverview District will be open in 15-minute segments, with five-minute travel intervals between showings. Here’s the tour schedule: [list the date, addresses, and times]
Walter will be on hand to inform you about recent sales in the neighborhood and can even tell you what your home is worth. Ron will be prequalifying buyers and giving out prequalification certificates that show the amount of loan you qualify for.
A tour map and brochures on each home will be available throughout the tour. And refreshments will be served at many of these fine homes.
WON’T BE REPEATED IN THE NEXT 12 MONTHS!
Bring your walking shoes, your car, your appetite, and (if you’d like a house) your wallet.
P.S.: You’ll get a ticket for every home you visit. At the last home, all the tickets will go in a bowl, and we’ll pull out one ticket. The lucky visitor will win a $100 gift certificate to our new local restaurant— PICCOLO’S!
Have guests fill out their tickets with their name, address, phone number, e-mail address, and reason for attending. Presto! You have a follow-up database.
Make a tour map, complete with all your contact info. And have up to 200 brochures on each property, along with plenty of business cards or personal brochures. Post yard signs at least five days before the event (if your local sign ordinance allows it). You also might want to post some directional signs, especially for the first house.
On open house day, you, your lender, and one helper should arrive at the first house about a half hour early to meet early arrivals. Fifteen minutes after the start of the first open house, you and your lender should go to the second house, and the helper should stay behind to clean and lock up.
As you move from house to house, you’ll pique the interest of other sellers in the vicinity and arouse competition among the tour group for your listings. Your sellers will be amazed at the amount of activity. You’ll have a group of prequalified buyers and down-the-road sellers to follow up with—and the lender will have more leads as well. You’ll be a hero!
Ask Walter
Q. In my area, it's rare to present an offer directly to the seller. What negotiating tactics do you think are most effective when the listing salesperson is presenting your buyer clients' offer?
Patti Kroeger
Deeb & Associates Real Estate
Omaha, Ne.
A. Great question!
Without a doubt, negotiating face-to-face is the most effective way to close a deal. There's no other way to effectively represent your client. After I’ve explained the benefits of having me present their offers directly to the sellers, all of my buyers have requested that I do so. Who better than you to put your buyer's best foot forward and suggest alternatives to sellers’ demands that still fall within your client's interests? So, even if direct negotiation is not common in your area, ask the listing salesperson or broker to let you present the offer yourself.
If you do find that you have to negotiate through a third party, your goal should be to establish as high a level of communication as possible. Include both the listing salesperson and the sellers in all e-mail communications with your clients that don’t include confidential information. Use fax machines, conference calls, and instant messaging to make your clients available to respond rapidly to questions about an offer. In a sellers’ market, you might even want to go as far as having your clients in a car outside the office or home when the offer is being presented. In this way, they demonstrate their commitment to making a deal, and they’re on the spot to discuss counteroffers. Keep in mind, however, that all of these choices represent extremely poor substitutes for a face-to-face meeting.
In my experience, anything other than direct contact doesn't represent your buyer to their full benefit. But if you don’t have that option, keeping communications line open and reinforcing the buyers interest to the sellers and the listing salesperson are essential.
Want selling and marketing advice? Send your questions for Walter Sanford to salesclinic@realtors.org | |
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