Anyone ever done an 'open day' when trying to sell their house ?

[mousemole]

Our house gets 'launched' this weekend with an open day. Its on with 2 agents and they are doing the launch event jointly. Anyone else done this before ? The agents say it is the thing to do but I'm not sure ?

it is fairly normal here to have open viewings.

I'm pleased that the viewings will happen on 1 day ( 2 people confirmed so far). Not sure how many viewings you tend to get on an open day. Presumably the idea is to create a bit of hype.

Where I live (Edinburgh) it is the standard way to sell a house. Tends to be open viewings Sunday 2-4pm and Thursdays 7-9pm. I have sold 4 properties this way and it works very well.

You get a mixture of serious buyers and nosey buggers. The good thing is that sometimes nosey buggers fall in love with it and put in an offer.

interesting Crack Fox.. I don't mind the nosy buggers if they are confined to one day and create a sense of competition ! How long did it take you to sell ?

The Edinburgh market is very competitive and the whole Scottish process doesn't seem to be as drawn out as the English legal system. However, bearing that in mind we sold our last flat in a week - June 2009. The longest it has taken us is 3 weeks.

Good luck.

My big advice would be, if possible, make sure the Dcs are out as it can be a bit confusing seeing all these people traipse through their home.

thanks CrackFox. Really need for it to go well and sell quickly as we have had an offer accepted on our dream house ! Fingers crossed !

Go for it, you have nothing to lose. x

We live in London in Wanstead. We had an open day in the 1st week or March and according to Our estate agent, we had 17 viewings. We had to leave the house at 9.30am and got back at 4pm. We had 3 offers that day. One apparently went straight to the estate agent that day to make an offer. Another came back that same day with another lot of people to view.

Apparently, we sold on the first day. This is quite common according to our EA. 8 houses have been on the market down our road and it's only a small cul de sac, ours being the 2nd. To my knowledge, they have all been sold. I know that out of the 8, 5 of these had open day.

I recommend this as it's all over in a day and you don't need the constant clearing/tidying up for each viewing.

wow TLD's - that is really encouraging ! Our house is in Surrey. Market seems to be picking up a bit over the last few weeks as far as I can see.Did you get offers near your asking price ? Were they 'good' buyers or had they not put their houses on the market/were in a long chain etc ?

This happened both with the house we're buying and the one we've just sold. We went to see a house during an open day on Saturday. On Monday morning the EA rang us to say someone had made an offer already and were we interested in seeing it again. If it hadn't been for this, we'd probably be still wondering whether to organise a second viewing a week or two later, but because of the pressure we did go and see it again and decided to put an offer ourselves. We then put our house on the market, had an open day with 7 viewings. Someone had sneaked in a viewing the previous day so by the time the open day came there was already an offer on the table and the pressure was on for those viewing that day. The next day we had 3 offers, one of them for the asking price and from people who were ready to move. The EA said they'd done that with a few houses recently and it worked well. And for us it was great that we only had to tidy up the house once and go out with the kids for the day.

The 1st offer was for £5K below the asking price, we accepted that one but when the EA emailed them the next day to ask for proof of the bank details to see if they were in a good position, the buyer got offended and said that he would pull out. The next day, the 2nd offer which was £20 below asking price phoned as asked for a 2nd viewing, after seeing the house that next, the next day, they upped their offer by £10k so now, in total, we are getting £10k below asking price which is really good as the house down this road are all going for £460- £480k. Not bad in this current situation.

Also, the good news is that they are 1st time buyers with no chain and we also have no chain.

To be honest, you have nothing to lose and a lot to gain. If you get it all done in one day, and get an offer, it makes it all worth while.

Vacaloca that is a great story - gives me enocuragement. TLD's - nice that you had another buyer to switch to once the other one had pulled out. Fingers crossed for good weather on Saturday !