Written from the trenches of Auckland real estate by Amit Sharma — Bayleys agent, 10+ years marketing experience.
An open home has one job, and it is not showing people the house — the photographs already did that. Its job is to find out which of the people standing in your lounge could actually buy it, and to give those people a reason to come back. Everything below is in service of that.
A walk-through is not a tour — it is a conversation. The agents who get the highest conversion are the ones who ask three or four well-placed questions in the first sixty seconds: how long have you been looking, what brought you to this suburb, what would have to be true for this to be the one. The answers shape everything that follows.
That third question is the one that earns its keep. "What would have to be true for this to be the one" surfaces the actual objection while the buyer is still in the room and still willing to say it out loud. Half the time it is something answerable on the spot — a school zone, a consent, whether the garage takes two cars. An objection you hear is one you can address. An objection they take home with them just becomes silence.
Listen for what they are comparing you to. Buyers almost always mention another property, and the comparison tells you exactly where your home sits in their mind and what would move it up.
Greet every group at the door by name, not "hi, just sign in over there." A signed-in stranger is a record. A named guest is a relationship.
Be straightforward about why you are collecting details, and respect the answer if someone would rather not give them. Under the Privacy Act you should be clear about what you are collecting and why, and in practice being upfront works better anyway — people who feel processed volunteer nothing useful, and the useful information is the entire point of the exercise.
Resist the urge to follow people around. Let them feel the home. Be available in the kitchen or by the back deck — the spaces where buyers naturally pause when they are interested.
There is a reliable tell worth watching for: buyers who are seriously interested slow down and start talking to each other rather than to the agent. They discuss where furniture would go, who gets which bedroom, what they would do with the back corner. That is the moment to be nearby and quiet. The buyers who move briskly through and thank you politely at the door have already decided.
The other tell is the second lap. Anyone who walks back into a room they have already seen is doing serious thinking, and they are the person to follow up first that evening.
Vendors should be out of the house, including the friendly ones. Buyers will not open a wardrobe, criticise the bathroom or talk honestly about price in front of the owner — and those three things are how a viewing turns into an offer.
Always follow up within 24 hours, ideally the same evening. A short, specific message ("you mentioned school zones — here is the in-zone document") beats a generic "thanks for visiting" by a wide margin.
Same evening genuinely beats next morning, because your home is competing with everything else they saw that Sunday and the memory blurs fast. Specificity is what makes it work: a message that references their actual conversation proves someone listened, which in an industry with a trust problem is worth more than any brochure.
And track everything. Names, comments, level of interest, second-visit requests. By week two of a campaign, the database tells you where the offers will come from — long before they are on paper.
This is also what makes vendor reporting honest rather than reassuring. Raw attendance numbers tell you very little — twenty groups with no second visits is a much weaker position than six groups with three returning. If your weekly update is a headcount and a mood, ask for the breakdown: who came back, who asked for documents, who has been to more than one, and who is still in the running.