Cooling Market Lifts Lid On Old Debate

She noted that in her 33 years in the business, the "general rule of thumb was that about one in 10 listings had open houses. . . . That was not true last year because many houses didn't make it to an open house" before going under contract.

It's back up to "maybe one in 15," she said.

"The sellers now all want them," said Becky Duckworth, a Re/Max Allegiance agent in Burke who was sitting at an empty Springfield house last Saturday.

Duckworth said Saturday open houses aren't traditional in most neighborhoods, including the quiet cul-de-sac where she was, but she said the sellers wanted to try in hopes of drawing a different crowd than they had previously reached.

She wasn't having much luck. "I've done it before when I had listings in Springfield Estates, across from Springfield Mall, because everybody goes shopping there on Saturday. But it's not working out as I had hoped today."

Duckworth said, though, that she didn't have high expectations. "In all my years of experience, open houses were more to give the house some exposure to people in the neighborhood," who might pass the word to friends or relatives, rather than to land a deal on the spot. In her 30 years, she said, she has seen only a handful of sales that came directly from the open house.

Like Duckworth, many agents say that open houses are just one part of a marketing plan. But some critics say they're pretty much a dead end for all but the agents themselves, who use them to "mine" for future buyers or sellers.

Smart Money magazine, for example, four years ago listed open houses among "Ten Things Your Real Estate Broker Won't Tell You." No. 1, according to the article: "Your open house is really a party for me."

The article cited a National Association of Realtors study "that found that their success rate is a mere 2%."

The association responds that it's not reliable to look at that figure in isolation. According to the group's 2005 survey of buyers and sellers, "51 percent of all buyers attended open houses" in searching for a home, a number exceeded only by those using agents (90 percent), the Internet (77 percent) and yard signs (71 percent), spokesman Walter Molony said. Internet searching "is the biggest change over time" in how people search, up from 2 percent a decade ago, he said.

"Obviously, open houses have value," Molony said. They are "a great way for a real estate agent to meet potential buyers and for buyers to meet potential agents. . . . But typically what happens today is that most people learn about listings on the Internet, and then they come to an open house or a showing. Do you have to have an open house? No. Is it helpful? Maybe. Will you find the buyer at your open house? Maybe, maybe not."

Molony said open houses are also "a great way to learn what houses are available in what price range in what area. They're part of the education process."

And, they're a prod to sellers to get their properties cleaned up, decluttered and spiffed up, he said.

Buffing up has taken on new significance as the market has cooled, agents say. Some, at both the high end and in the middle, are working harder to "stage" houses for sale, meaning they bring in better furniture, accessories and even table settings and plants or rearrange existing stuff. Other agents are hiring companies to stage for them.

Done in a Day, a relatively new entrant in the staging business, opened 2 1/2 years ago in Northwest Washington and has seen business double in the first five months of this year because of the cooling market and the heated-up competition, said Caroline Carter, president and chief executive.

And she said her firm has successfully turned houses that were sitting on the market for months into open-house sales.

Carter has five design assistants, two warehouses full of furnishings and a list of workers to call on to revitalize houses going on the market. A typical three-bedroom house that needs a fresh-me-up could cost $2,000, Carter said. A vacant house of that size might run $8,000.

Carter recently staged two vacant houses with about 6,000 square feet of emptiness at a charge of about $11,000 each. Sounds high, but just providing the lighting at each house took about 50 lamps.

One of Carter's customers, Patrice Pisinski, said staging helped move her three-story townhouse in Northwest closer to sale. "She basically kind of cleaned it up a little bit and rearranged it because I've got two kids and we needed to show that it had more usable space," Pisinski said. "I understand there were like 40 people that came to the open house, and we got an offer on the following Monday."

She added, "I think open houses are effective because many people can come in and provide comments about a lot of things. So you can kind of begin to visualize things the way they see them."

But according to her real estate agent, the full story is a bit more complicated. Rossana Grimm, the W.C.& A.N. Miller agent who listed Pisinski's million-plus house, said a contract was offered on a Friday, before the open house was held but after the staging. "They made the offer because the house looked absolutely gorgeous," said Grimm. She said two offers also came in from the open house, but that was too late.

Back in Kensington, at a house that the Heneys visited, the seller has decided to give up on open houses, said agent Pari Kahen of Weichert Realtors in Silver Spring. The seller, who turned a 1953 bungalow into a two-story European-design showcase, has grown frustrated after three months of marketing it himself and two weeks of open houses with an agency, she said. "All he's getting are people who are not qualified for [his] price range," Kahen said. "And he is worried about foot traffic across his new hardwood floors."

Instead, the seller is reducing the price, from $829,000 to $799,000, she said.

Price decreases and slowing sales are fine as far as the Heneys are concerned. "We're liking this market," Mike Heney said. "It's nice to have a choice again."