Open Day

adg1

poppysarah wrote: »

The idea is to drum up interest ... they've had some on a TV show on BBC1 previously and they've all been poorly attended

Saying that, my friend has just sold his house on an open day two weeks ago at 5% under the full asking price. They do work, but remember the agent works for the Vendor not Buyer so they are looking to get as much money as they can.

kmmr

Open days are standard in Australia, and all will be advertised in advance so you can easily spend your Saturdays following a route to check out all the houses.

They even do it for rentals - just short 15 minute sessions. I remember traipsing around Manly with 10 couples as we went from one little two bed flat to another for about 3 hours. The agents know and will try not to arrange clashing times with similar flats.

Makes it much easier in my opinion. I hate over here that I have to book each visit when the EA is available.

kmmr

Also excellent if you are just a nosy neighbour.

Running_Horse

The only one we went to was for a house that wouldn't sell even in the boom years. It was a modern ex-council house in a village. On the day we were the only ones who turned up, and realised it hadn't sold due to thousands of birds living in the sheds next door, and communal access across the back garden. The agents were practically begging us to make even a very low offer. Can't see the point myself. The system of booking houses you want to see when you want to see them is more logical, and I wouldn't be hyped into bidding for something on a day that doesn't suit me.

Milliewilly

I went to an open day a few weeks ago on a deceased estate. 50 viewing with me on the saturday and another 30 went on the sunday. 8 proceedable offers of asking price (£249950) made to the EA the following week with best and final offers by the Friday.

My experience is open days are generally empty properties where the EA understandably doesn't want to do dribs and drabs of viewings over a long period of time.

Unless you make a huge cash offer there is no reason for the sale / open day not to go ahead. After all, all the advertising will have been done and the chances of anyone being able to complete by 9th January are slim to say the least.

tbs624

We used the Open Day method to sell one of our houses ( pre-housing slump), simply because we didn't want viewings every evening of the week with the usual proportion of timewasters

We were then happy to have 2nd viewings, when requested, over a couple of evenings during the following week.

Not a property with "issues", just the manner that suited us best at the time in view of work and family commitments.

not_loaded

bramble1 wrote: »

How do you mean? That is exactly what an open is designed to do, if you like the look of somewhere and you see other people looking around looking interested you don't want someone else to get your dream home before you do. It's a good way to generate offers on a property.

Umm… Yes… But OP is a buyer not a seller, so “don't want someone else to get your dream home before you do” is not quite the psychology we’re looking for here.

Let’s face it; the seller has in mind a price they want. If that were to be offered a week before the Open Day they’d have to be very brave to put that off.

A neighbour of mine had just two viewers for his Open Day recently. One of which clearly was not in a position to buy, and the other ‘wanted something bigger’. So if he’d turned away pre open day viewings he’d have looked pretty silly.

Tony_R I’d be very interested to know if you got anywhere with a viewing request. Nobody needs to play the underdog in the current climate.