Open houses a sign of times
Traditional events to market homes for sale are returning, but as more subdued affairs
In Houston’s priciest neighborhoods, broker open houses are fancy affairs. They offer catered lunches, wine and cheese tastings and sometimes even live music and expensive champagne. Usually, the nicer the house, the better the spread.
Since the pandemic struck, those practices have been thrown out the picture window. Nowadays, open houses are sparse, subdued affairs where attendees sport masks and breeze through in a matter of minutes.
The traditional open house has changed dramatically over the past three months, reflecting both the fears of COVID-19 gripping buyers and sellers and the tentativeness of a once-booming housing market. The return of open houses, as stripped down as they may be, captures the competing forces shaping today’s market, a confusing mix of pandemic, recession and ultra-low mortgage rates, which, in many cases, are giving house hunters the courage to hunt.
Jittery sellers who have pulled listings from the market have pushed historically low inventory even lower. Buyers who have little to choose from are flocking to open houses or finding other ways to see properties, even if not in person.
Agents have held more than 1,100 “virtual open houses” in Houston since mid-April and many online listings now feature 3D images allowing a prospect to view nearly every square inch of a home in high definition.
“That’s perhaps been the savior for the market,” said national housing economist Ralph McLaughlin, who just sold his own home in a Washington, D.C., suburb, forgoing an open house.
When the coronavirus became a threat in Houston and the city started shutting down, many sellers opted to do the same. They didn’t want strangers traipsing through the bedrooms, bathrooms and kitchens out of fear of the disease spreading to their families. Some open houses continued, but they were mostly limited to new homes
or properties whose owners had already moved out.
Now, as the local economy reopens, open houses have returned. Over the Memorial Day weekend, just after the Houston Association of Realtors began allowing agents to advertise open houses on har.com after blocking the notifications amid COVID-19, more than 3,200 houses were open for public showings. This weekend, 2,727 live open houses are scheduled.
During those months when inperson open houses were frowned upon, agents began showing properties through video calls or livestreaming. Some, who aren’t yet comfortable with all the face time, still are.
“Some agents say they’re not even sure if they’re going to continue with open houses,” Gordana Vickers, an agent with Compass, said last week at an open house in Briargrove, a leafy neighborhood west of the Galleria. “They’re doing the video tours on the phone, they’re opening virtually, and I think they’re getting a pretty decent response that way.”
Generally, open house activity has been tepid. People afraid to go out or worried about job security stopped looking for a new home. Sales during each of the last two months have been off 20 percent compared with April and May last year.
Managing demand
In some neighborhoods, however, demand hasn’t seemed to have missed a beat. On the first Saturday in June, Boulevard Realty agent Star Massing hosted an open house in the Heights billed as a “one-of-akind” design recognized in architectural publications. The event started at 2 p.m. and a line to get in quickly snaked around the property. Over the next three hours, about 100 people walked through the house, many of whom waited in the blistering sun to get a look at the 1993 contemporary, built for an artist on a corner lot on Euclid and listed for $800,000.
It took four people to manage the event. There was a check-in station, a waiting area and each group — there were primarily couples — was escorted through the house separately. Masks were provided for those who didn’t have them and visitors were told not to touch anything.
“I was going to have two agents do it for me,” Massing said. “After five minutes they were like, ‘We need help.’ ”
Whether geared toward buyers or agents, open houses are a vital part of the real estate industry. While they may not directly lead to a sale, the practice has long been used as a tool for agents or builders to find new clients. Oftentimes neighbors will come by just out of curiosity. In the industry, they’re known as “looky-loos,” but even those visits can help lead to an eventual sale if they help spread the word about a house.
On Sunday in the Glenmore Forest subdivision of Spring Branch, Paul McHugh, a builder, had put up open house signs and was waiting for visitors inside the $1.45 million home he completed just before everything in Houston shut down.
“The first week was great and then it was nothing,” McHugh said. “It was just dead.”
But visits have picked up.
“In the last two weeks my open houses have been fantastic,” he said. “If I get four it’s a success. Last week I had seven on Saturday and nine on Sunday.”
Agents selling existing homes in the neighborhood have been doing more open houses, too.
McHugh can see how homeowners might not want to open their houses due to the coronavirus, but shoppers want to experience a property in person before buying. They want to feel the finishes and walk through it.
Vickers, the Compass agent, still thinks open houses are worth the effort — even if there’s only a 1 percent chance of a sale. “If we don’t have the open house, we miss that 1 percent,” she said.
In Briargrove on a recent Thursday, more than a dozen agents were holding a progressive broker open house, where multiple houses were open at the same time for their peers to view in hopes they’d see something that would suit a client.
Charlie Neath, an agent with Compass wearing a mask decorated by his 9-year-old daughter, said he was pleased with the positive feedback he’d gotten from the agents who had breezed through his $1.7 million listing on Piping Rock. The home has been on the market for about three months.
Across the street, Jackie Cathriner, an agent with Rob Adams Properties, greeted visitors from the foyer of the $1.1 million traditional built in 2006, standing by a table with a stack of masks, small bottles of hand sanitizer and a box of latex gloves.
While she was glad be able to show off homes in person again, Cathriner said broker open houses used to be much more lively affairs. There was always lunch and it often became a social event.
“People would come and talk. You would get to know the agents and the brokers and who was looking for what. And you’d get to experience the house as a home,” she said. “It was really fun, and the house would always smell good.”