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How to run a successful open house in London.

Hi there! My name is Danny Valencia with my city nest powered by Keller Williams and I'm a property consultant here in the area I was born and raised in London. I love London, my passionate about the people. And for the last decade I've been educating people on how to buy, sell and invest in this great city. So, if you liked this video, please subscribe, share. I'd be very, very grateful.

So one of the things that my colleagues and I came up with, we'd been doing this for a very long time, is top level open house. So I'm going to be sharing here with you today. 10 steps to run a successful open house in London.

10 Steps for A Successful Open House

1. Prepare Food & drinks

So you have here, it's an event reverse engineering. So let me explain what I mean by that. You need to remember the this is indeed an event and therefore you need to know who the target audience is. How are you going to score a goal if you don't know what the goal is? So that's the very first thing you want to find out. And to be honest with you as a seller, you already know who the potential buyer is going to be. You know the community, you know the neighborhood. And then based on that we have a conversation and we consult with the seller. But again, you should know who that is. So, based on that, once you know who that target audience is, then based on that, you then want to prepare the foods gate, the caterers and make sure who that's going to be serving. So as an example, it was a professional couple that you feel the target audience is going to be. Then you may want to do something like wine and cheese. If it's family and more kids orientated, then you want to have it kids, uh, kid-friendly. So, perhaps some juices, ice cream or something like that. So just make sure the food and the entertainment, which we're going to talk about right now is appropriate.

2. Live Entertainment (If applicable)

So entertainment, we got live entertainment if applicable. This may not be applicable for all open houses, but just up to two, um, keeping in mind it really just sets the tone and may show your property in the best possible light. So as an example, we might have live musicians or perhaps again if it's family orientated, you might have something that entertains the kids, maybe someone doing some balloons which are, you know, quite fancy, a clown or some sort. So, just a few ideas to throw out there and I can share some more with you as well.

3. Door Knock Invites

So, step number three for a successful open house is door knocking, "Door Knocking Invites". So, let me explain, there is such a thing as an inactive buyer, so in, in active buyer someone that perhaps is not actively looking online on a daily basis or even a weekly basis to search for properties. They may not even be popping into a estate agencies because they may have been looking for six, seven, eight months, couldn't find what they're looking for, got fed up and just stopped looking and said, you know what, we'll just start again at some point over the summer because you know what, we can't even find what we're looking for. Now. Imagine this, with the right stimulus they would buy. So imagine this one evening, that home, they get a knock on the door and there was an agent there, or perhaps yourself, if you're thinking of doing this yourself as a seller and has a very beautiful brochure and says them, we want to invite you to an open house, down the road, which is a two bedroom, two bathroom, high ceilings, lots of natural light coming in for £1 million.

4. Inactive Buyer

And they're like, "how amazing"! We were thinking about, we were actually looking for a property last year. We couldn't find it. We were actually thinking of citing again in four or five months. We'd love to come or perhaps to say to you, well actually, we're not looking to buy. But my brother just got back from New Zealand and I'd love for them to move in the area. So there you are, you know, there is such a thing as a inactive buyer, I'm very old fashioned person. I love to have people face to face and yet I know there are limits to that and there's only so many people you can actually reach face to face. So another thing we do is we partner up with a very clever companies which identified the demographics of different people. They know whether they're more likely to move, they know whether they have enough income to be moving to a specific property that we are going to list. And therefore based on that we also send these very beautiful brochures to certain addresses to invite those inactive buyers.

5. Database Buyers

Now we have step five, database five. Obviously as an estate agents, a state agency, we have a ton of data, um, or buyers who are potentially looking to move into the area. And we make sure that we're proactive and we get on the phones and get on the emails and actually make sure we reach out to all of these buyers to invite them to the open house. Or perhaps maybe they know someone that's looking to move into the area. So that's number five.

6. Invite Agents

And then we have agents. So I'd love this sign "To sell a house once you need to sell it twice". Let me explain. Agents, very good agents that is, sell houses to other agents and those agents go on to actually sell it to the clients that are on the database. So no one agent has 100% of a market share when it comes to buyers or even listens for that fact. So, it makes sense that you want to make sure that you turn every stone, you lift every stone out there to make sure that if there is a buyer out there that's willing to pay the amount that you're marketing the property for that you turn every stone out there. And the only real way to do that is you need to make sure that you reach out to every agent out there and ask them to bring their buyers. Now why would they do that? Well of course you need to give them an incentive to do that. And that's a model that we have here in the office in my city nest and make sure that we incentivize all the agents. And these are not only the local agents in the neighborhood, but also the other neighborhoods surrounding the area as well as well as relocation agents. So again, if you have an agent working for you at the moment, perhaps you have a property on the market or perhaps you're thinking of just doing this yourself, you might want to call those agents in every neighborhood. They'd probably be around about 30 agencies. So you may have your co in work cut out for yourself in terms of every neighborhood, probably roundabout 60 90 calls and you need to make sure you're consistent and reaching out to them. So you need to make sure you reach out to the agents. So that's number six.

7. Run Facebook and Instagram advertisement

Now, step number seven for holding an open house is you want to make sure that you reach out on social media and you want to spend the right amount of money. And again, you wana to make sure that you have the right target audience. So you want to run Facebook ads, Instagram ads within the invitations to this demographic of the property that you're selling. Um, so that's number seven in terms of ads.

8. Invite on Facebook and Instagram

And then you also do invites, which are not ads but just general, invites to people who, you know, people in your network and just reach out to people who potentially want to move into the area. So that's that number number eight.

9. Invite on community platforms

Now, step number nine, in terms of holding a successful open house platform is community platforms, so you have so many community platforms, whether that's Facebook community or whether that's nextdoor.com. There are a number of community platforms out there and you want to make sure that your open house invites are out there as well.

10. Promote on all portals

Then you want to make sure that for number 10 for the open house, you want to make sure that you do run, your open house on the listing itself. So Rightmove, Zoopla, prime location, wherever you're advertising that, that listing, you want to make sure that you have the open house invite there.

So there is a lot of preparation that goes into this open house. It's not rocket science. All you need is time network and then I say it skills. When you do get those buyers in, you want to make sure you're skillful enough to be able to communicate with those buyers and be able to negotiate the proper price for the property. Cause ultimately, you know, you can have people come through the door but if you're not negotiating with them properly they can come and go.

So, I hope this is helpful in terms of open house. If there's any questions that you may have, let me know. There are other steps to this in terms of doing the open house and then post open house. And if you found this video interesting and you want to find out more, perhaps you have comments, please make sure you subscribe, hit the light button, share this with friends and family, and I'll make sure that we do another two videos as an extension of this.

Thank you, My City Nest powered by Keller Williams. Bye.