By Eric Berman, REALTOR® | The Eric Berman Team at Compass
TL;DR:
An open house is a marketing event, not a sales event. It rarely produces the buyer who purchases the home, and that is not a failure — its actual jobs are creating a concentrated moment of visible demand and generating the feedback that tells a seller what the market thinks of their price.
What an Open House Is Actually For
The honest version of this conversation starts with a concession: most homes are not sold at their open house. The buyer who writes the offer usually came through on a private showing, sent by their own agent, having already seen the listing online three days earlier. Open house attendance skews toward the curious, the early-stage, and the neighbors.
That fact gets used, wrongly, as an argument that open houses don't work. They work — they just don't do the thing sellers think they're doing. An open house does three real jobs. It concentrates traffic into a two-hour window, so that a house that would have drawn six visitors across a week draws them at once, in front of each other, with cars on the street. It captures the buyers who don't have an agent yet, who are earlier in the process than the ones being escorted around. And it produces feedback — unfiltered, in volume, from people who have just walked through five other houses in the same price band that morning.
The third one is the most valuable and the most ignored. Twenty people walking through a house and none of them writing an offer is not a bad Sunday. It's data, and it arrives in week two when it can still change the outcome.
Timing, and the First Weekend
The first weekend is the only one that carries real weight. A listing that goes live Thursday and opens Sunday hits the market with maximum accumulated demand — every buyer who has been watching that price band for months sees it at once, and they all show up in the same two hours. That is the concentration effect working. The same open house in week seven draws four people and signals that the house hasn't sold.
Which is why the sequencing matters more than the event. Photography done, listing live midweek, syndication out, the open house on the following Sunday. On the North Shore, midday Sunday is the reliable window, and the second-best answer is usually Saturday. What does not work is opening before the listing has had time to circulate — that's an open house for an audience that hasn't heard about it yet.
Running an open house every weekend, on the other hand, is a signal, and buyers read it correctly: this house isn't moving. Two, maybe three, is the useful ceiling. After that, the event stops generating demand and starts advertising its absence.
The Feedback Is the Product
Twenty-five people through the door and no offers means something specific, and the specificity is recoverable if someone is asking. Buyers at an open house are unusually candid — they've just seen the competition, they have no relationship with the seller, and they'll say things to a stranger that they'd never put in an email through their agent.
What they say sorts into patterns. If the recurring comment is the price, that's a price problem and it showed up in week two rather than week eight. If it's the layout, the lot, or the location, that's structural and it isn't fixable — but it's priceable. If it's the kitchen, the paint, or the smell of the basement, that's correctable in a week. And if the comments are positive and specific but nobody writes, that's usually the price again, said politely.
The dangerous version is the open house where nobody asks. The house was opened, some people came, the agent stood in the kitchen, and the seller got a text saying it went well. That's an event that consumed a Sunday and produced nothing, and it's the version that gives open houses their reputation.
The Seller Should Not Be There
This is the one piece of advice sellers resist and the one that matters most.
A seller in the house changes what happens in it. Buyers don't open closets when the owner is standing in the hallway. They don't say what they actually think. They don't linger, and lingering is the whole point — the buyer who spends twenty minutes in a house is the buyer who is imagining living in it. A present seller compresses that to a polite six-minute lap and a thank you.
There's a second reason, and it's the more serious one. A seller in casual conversation says things that cost money: why they're moving, when they need to be out, what they'd take. Every one of those is leverage handed to someone who may be writing an offer that afternoon. There's also a Fair Housing dimension — a friendly, well-meant conversation about who lives on the block or what the neighborhood is like is exactly the kind of exchange that creates real liability, and it happens in kitchens at open houses more than anywhere else. The clean answer is that the seller is not home, and that the licensee handles the conversation.
Practically: lights on throughout, valuables and prescriptions secured, pets gone, and every visitor signed in. The sign-in isn't a marketing gimmick — it's a record of who was in the house.
What This Service Covers
The open house is scheduled against the listing's launch rather than dropped on the calendar — photography, live date, syndication, and then the event, in that order, so it lands when the accumulated demand is at its peak. Promotion runs across the syndicated portals, social, the Compass network, and direct outreach to the agents who are actively working that price band and that town, which is the channel that reliably produces the buyers who matter.
The event itself is staffed and run by the licensee, not left to a lockbox: every visitor signed in, questions handled, the seller's information protected, and the conversation kept inside Fair Housing lines. Preparation is handled beforehand — lighting, presentation, and the security items sellers forget.
Then the part that actually earns the Sunday: structured feedback collection, sorted into what's price, what's condition, and what's structural, delivered to the seller as a read rather than a reassurance. Where that feedback says the price is wrong, it gets said. For sellers weighing the improvements worth making before the market sees the house, that conversation belongs before the first open house, not after it. When the traffic converts into offers, the offer review work picks up from there.
How This Usually Plays Out
The recurring version on the North Shore: first open house, thirty people through, no offers, and the seller reads that as a failure. The feedback says otherwise. Eleven of the thirty mentioned the price against a specific comparable two blocks over that closed last month for less. Two mentioned the kitchen. Nobody mentioned the layout or the lot, which is the good news — the fixable thing is the number, and it surfaced in week two with the listing still fresh instead of in week nine with the listing stale. A seller who acts on that has a very different outcome than one who runs the same open house four more times.
The other one is quieter. A seller who insists on being home, because they know the house best and want to answer questions. They mention, warmly and in passing, that they're closing on a place in Florida in six weeks. The buyer who heard it writes at ninety-two percent of ask that evening, and there's no good answer to it — because they know the seller's timeline and the seller doesn't know theirs. That conversation cost more than every dollar spent on staging.
FAQs
Are open houses still effective on Long Island?
Yes, but not for the reason sellers assume. The buyer who purchases usually comes through a private showing, not the open house. The event's real value is concentrating traffic into a visible window, capturing buyers who don't have an agent yet, and generating candid feedback in week two rather than week eight.
How long should an open house run, and when?
Two to three hours, midday, with Sunday the reliable window on the North Shore and Saturday the second-best. The timing that matters more is where it sits relative to the listing launch — photography, live date, syndication, then the open house, so it lands when accumulated demand peaks.
Do open houses actually lead to offers?
Occasionally directly, more often indirectly. They generate the visible activity and agent awareness that produce private showings, and they surface the pricing information that determines whether offers come at all. A busy open house with no offers is not a failure — it is a specific piece of information about the price.
Should a seller be home during an open house?
No, and this is the one worth being firm about. Buyers don't open closets, linger, or speak candidly with the owner present. Sellers also volunteer information in conversation — why they're moving, when they need to be out — that becomes leverage against them in a negotiation that afternoon.
How many open houses should a listing have?
Two or three, concentrated early. The first weekend carries most of the weight. Running one every weekend past that tells buyers the house isn't selling, and the event stops creating demand and starts advertising its absence.
Two Hours, Used Properly
The open house that works is not the one with the most people. It's the one that happens at the right moment in the listing's life and produces an honest read on why the house hasn't sold yet — early enough that the answer still costs nothing to act on.
For sellers thinking about where their home actually sits against what buyers are choosing between, a current look at Long Island home values is the place that conversation starts. The rest is welcome whenever it's useful.
By Eric Berman, REALTOR® | The Eric Berman Team at Compass
Eric Berman | Long Island & Queens REALTOR® | Compass
1468 Northern Blvd, Manhasset, NY 11030
(917) 225-8596 | eric@ericbermanteam.com | theericbermanteam.com
