North Shore Views

St. Paddy’s Day Parade of Homes – How Broker Opens Help Sell a House

Broker opens are one of those tools in a Realtor’s marketing toolkit that we don’t think too much about. Unlike most of the standard tactics this one is not aimed at the buying public but at the other agents. Broker opens are a great way for agents to efficiently familiarize themselves with what’s new on the market. If done right, an agent can see 10 or 15  houses in the 3 hour window each week. You get the list. Map out your route. Spend 10 minutes in each house and move on to the next one.

For listing agents, broker opens are a good way to make sure their listing stays top of mind with other agents. It’s also a good way to showcase features of the home that are not easily explained in the listing remarks.  Agents use a number of bribes tactics to attract other agents to their open houses and get them to linger longer. The most popular bribe is food. Gourmet lunch is to Realtors as Dunkin Donuts is to cops.  Feed them and they will come. Another typical tactic is giving gift cards to everyone who shows up. Starbucks and Panera cards are pretty standard bribes around here.

My partner, Maureen, never does anything “standard”. She prides herself on her creativity. Her newspaper ads don’t look like other Realtor ads. They always have a humorous theme or clever hook that makes people notice and remember her. Her broker opens are not like other agents’ either. She always tries to make them special and fun, so that her listings stand out from the others. Her “events” are always memorable, and so are the houses that are the venues.

Maureen is also Irish (2nd generation) and she takes great pride in her Irishness. So it didn’t surprise me to hear her idea for this week’s broker open: a St. Paddy’s Day Parade of Homes. She put four of her listings on the “parade” and sent out a flier to all the North Shore agents letting them know how the tour would work: at each home there were tickets to a drawing for a pot of gold ($100 in gold dollar coins) at the last house. If you went to all four houses you would collect four tickets, meaning you would have four chances to win the pot of gold. At each house there was also a grab bag of silly St. Patrick’s Day trinkets to get everyone in the mood. And at the last house there was a big Irish feast for lunch: yummy corned beef sandwiches, Irish soda bread, cookies decorated with shamrocks, Green River…you get the idea. And, of course, we had the drawing for the pot of gold.

The result:  all four “parade” homes had a better than average turnout and everyone lingered at the last house eating, chatting and soaking up all the features of that lovely and unique home.  And, as the agents enjoyed Maureen’s hospitality, they were thinking about which of their clients this might be the perfect home for.

So, when you get ready to list your house for sale, ask your agent what creative marketing ideas they have that will set your home apart.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

May your pockets be heavy and your heart be light.
May good luck pursue you each morning and night.

Tags: broker open house, marketing your home, Maureen Spriggs

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 17th, 2010 at 9:13 am and is filed under Real estate, Selling a home. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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