Real Estate Agents – Open House Success Form

My wife and I went on a little open house tour yesterday, mostly just for fun – who knows in a year or 2 we could get the itch to move. I mention the last part because it's important. Most of y'all real estate agents and real estate investors reading this already know that the chances of a hot buyer walking into your open house and making an offer on that very property are highly unlikely. Yet, for the most part, real estate agents and investors keep doing open houses anyway, opening and closing doors for short term tire kickers who could be and should be “treated” like lots of serious long term money.

Real Estate Agent Gaffe

Take yesterday for example. We went to 4 open houses. I chit chatted with real estate agents at each open house. But 0, 0, 0, 0 did anything to implore us to provide an email address so that they could follow up and start to build a relationship with us – future buyers & sellers. Sure, they had “open house registration” sheets – but of course we promptly ignored them, because after all, no one instructed us to sign or gave us a good reason for doing so.

At the 4th property, as we walked out the agent asked us what we thought of the property. My wife said: “We really really liked it!”.
The agent's response – “Oh well great, well -feel free to call me anytime.” And that was it!

We got about halfway to the car and I told Michelle I just had to run back and try to help the guy out. She gave me exactly 2 minutes (and believe me, she would have pulled off if I spent a second over 2 minutes)to have my fun with this real estate agent and help him with his marketing.

Real Estate Agent Open House Fundamentals

So I ran back up, and gave a short winded “What gives man? Why didn't you try to get my email address? Why didn't you offer to send us other properties like this one. Or tease us about a juicy deal you know about that just came back on the market. Or offer up your awesome real estate report about why now is a strangely weird, but potentially awesome time to buy a home?

Well that's not exactly how it went, but that's what I tried to impart and as I was leaving, I literally forced my email address on the guy and encouraged him to spam me.

So here's the thing. (I know this is fundamental real estate agent stuff, but it's easy to forget the fundamentals, right?) Your open houses don't have to be such a ridiculous waste of time – at the very least you can use them as LIST BUILDING OPPORTUNITIES.

Real Estate Agent List Building Strategy & Form

Meaning, you can actually use your open houses to collect the email addresses of people who may or may not be interested in doing business with you sometime in the next weeks/months/years.
Of course this implies that you'll actually make an effort to (dare I say it) “Sell” the idea to your open house visitors. And of course if you're going to build a list of prospects, you'll also want to follow up and incubate them through your sales funnel.

Easier said then done? Maybe – but I am thinking this form might help that I use for my open houses. Below is a sample copy of a very effective open house list building sign in sheet.