An open house puts thirty strangers in your hallway on a Saturday morning. It is a marketing tactic that markets the agent, and we have never been able to make the numbers say otherwise.

What it actually does

It creates the appearance of demand, which is not the same as demand. Buyers can count the room too. If eight of the thirty are neighbours and nine more are three months from being able to proceed, the effect on a serious buyer is not urgency but doubt.

It also compresses every viewing into the worst possible format. Nobody asks a real question with four other people listening. The questions that matter — about the lease, the neighbours, the winter damp in the back bedroom — get asked in private or not at all.

What we do instead

Twenty-minute appointments, one party at a time, spread over two days. It costs us more Saturdays. It has never cost the seller money, and in the eleven cases where we have run both formats on comparable houses, the private schedule exchanged faster every time.