By Dan Rafter
Special to The Washington Post
Saturday, November 8, 2008
David Mayhood isn't a fan of holding raffles, hiring chamber musicians or giving away flat-screen TVs at the open houses that his condominium marketing and sales firm holds.
But cozy private dinners for six? Demonstrations of high-end kitchen appliances? Pricey wines provided by a local business? These are the extra touches that Mayhood, president of the Mayhood Co. in McLean, has been using to add dash to the open houses he has arranged for Turnberry Tower, a luxury high-rise condo development targeted to open a year from now in Rosslyn.
Units range from about $800,000 to more than $4 million. Potential buyers, then, are looking for more than the traditional open house with a plate of chocolate chip cookies in the kitchen.
"We want our private dinner parties to create a sense of the lifestyle at Turnberry Tower," Mayhood said. "We want our guests to get a sense of what it will be like to live in Turnberry."
Perhaps a few years ago, during the height of the residential real estate boom, Mayhood would have held a by-the-numbers open house for Turnberry, with sales managers explaining the project's features to potential buyers.
Today, though, Mayhood is among a growing number of real estate professionals across the country who are holding what are known as extreme open houses to entice potential buyers through the doors. These open houses up the ante, turning what is normally a quick peek through a home on a Sunday afternoon into an event. The events are gaining in popularity even though many agents still say that few sales are actually made at open houses.
Agents holding extreme open houses may hire professional musicians to play as guests tour the property. They may pay to have skilled chefs create gourmet meals to show off a remodeled kitchen. Other agents have held wine tastings and, if the home happens to have a sprawling backyard, an extravagant barbecue.
Proponents of such events say they differ from the giveaways that other open houses have often offered. Instead of giving away a free plasma TV as an incentive for buying, these open houses are designed to bring people in the doors for events that feel more like parties than sales pitches. Agents who hold these events say they work best for higher-end properties, homes that have some unique characteristics -- remarkable yards or extremely high-end appliances -- that agents can focus on.
House hunters looking for such lavish treatment in the Washington region may be disappointed, though. Extreme open houses are still rarities here, Mayhood's dinner parties notwithstanding.
Local agents say the reason is simple: The buyers here aren't looking for glitz, even if they're at the high end of the market. They're more interested in finding a house that is a fair value in a good location and is the right fit for their lifestyles.
"We see a lot of those more unique open houses in New York," said Jane Fairweather, an agent with Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage in Bethesda. "The New York clientele, though, is so much different than ours. You have more high-end rollers there. It's a more international market. Our international market tends toward government or quasi-government industries. New York has more of an extravagant party lifestyle. While D.C. is a very sophisticated town, it is also a very conservative one. Glitzy things don't go over well here."
An extreme open house works only if the event manages to showcase what is special about a home, said Margaret Rome, owner of TREC, a real estate firm in Baltimore.
In September, Rome held a large barbecue, complete with a huge smoker filled with sizzling meat, at a listing in Finksburg, Md. The event worked because the large house, with 5,000 square feet of living space, boasts a big back yard. Rome was able to highlight just how many people could fit and eat comfortably in the outdoor space.
The event attracted 15 guests, which Rome said is good for an open house in the area, northwest of Baltimore. The house has not yet sold, but the open house brought in several potential buyers, Rome said. Events such as the barbecue are also ways to spread positive word about properties, she said, as guests tell their friends and neighbors about the home they've just seen.
"It gave exposure to a house that may not have had a tremendous amount of exposure," Rome said. "There was nothing wrong with the house. It just hasn't found the right buyer yet. In a situation like this, you have to get creative to bring buyers and sellers together."
A year ago, Rome held another flashy open house, this time throwing a "champagne and popcorn" bash for a listing in Baltimore. The event, as its name suggested, featured both treats and was unusual enough to attract more than 50 attendees.
Rome has since sold the property. She credits this open house, too, for building interest in a listing that hadn't been receiving attention.
To bring people to the event, Rome said, she called other real estate agents so that they would bring their clients. She also heavily advertised the event on her Web site. Rome is a user of ActiveRain, an online networking site populated by real estate professionals; she advertised the open house on that site extensively.
"In this market, you can't do what every other agent already does," Rome said. "You can't put a sign in the ground, put the listing on the MLS [multiple listing service] and then pray. That's not enough in this market. You have too much competition for your listings today."
Tatiana Hunter, the former owner of the Baltimore home that hosted the champagne-and-popcorn open house, said she was pleased to work with a real estate agent who wasn't afraid to try something different.
Today, Hunter lives and works in Cedar Crest, N.M., where she runs her own pottery business. She said she still has fond memories of the sales event.
"I was fortunate to have an agent with imagination and a well-developed sense of fun," she said. "Our intent was to bring in potential buyers, of course, but then there is always that indefinable ripple effect that an imaginatively conceived event will cause."
Hunter admitted that the open house, because of its unusual theme, may have pulled in guests who were more curious about her home than they were serious about buying it. But even this is a benefit, she said.
"In retail, it is impossible to know who will tell who," she said. "That 'string-of-pearls' effect is often engaged in an open house. The open house was tremendously successful."
Mayhood considers his private-dinner open houses to be essential sales tools for Turnberry. They're especially important, he said, because sales agents don't have a finished product to show.
The small dinner parties, which Mayhood's company began holding early this year, are a way to set the luxury tower apart from other buildings, Mayhood said. Representatives of Miele, the company supplying high-end appliances for Turnberry, fix a gourmet meal for guests in the sales office kitchen. Mayhood supplements the three- or four-course meal with wine from a local shop.
The guest list is made up of people who have already purchased units at Turnberry and those who are considering doing so. This gives potential buyers a chance to talk with people who have already invested, Mayhood said. The guest list also includes members of the sales team and the project's head of construction, all of whom are available to answer questions.
As of late October, Mayhood had held six dinners to promote Turnberry. Some of these guests have turned into buyers, he said.
"We have an average sales price of $1.5 million with this project," Mayhood said. "Buyers need to take a while to think about their purchase in this price range. This kind of event is designed to give them a feel of what they may be investing in."
Most local open houses aren't that elaborate.
Ilene Kessler, an agent with Re/Max Advantage Realty in Columbia, has long been a fan of open houses, holding them even when the residential market was booming and other agents had abandoned the events, labeling them old-fashioned and ineffective.
Today, Kessler posts her open-house listings on popular Internet sites, promotes them among her fellow brokers and, of course, sends out postcards to let neighbors know.
As she always does, Kessler makes sure to have cookies, fruit and beverages at her open houses. That's standard. But for holidays, Kessler adds some extra touches. Around Halloween, she'll decorate with witches, pumpkins and ghosts. On the Fourth of July, she'll plant U.S. flags around the property.
"I like to use the little props," she said. "I collect these things all year long. I think it helps people remember the homes. They don't look exactly like every other home they've seen. Sometimes the decorations jog their memories. I try to create an atmosphere for sellers that makes people want to buy their homes and feel positive when they're in them."
Kessler's Halloween ghosts may not seem to be in the same league as barbecue dinners or private dinner parties. But to the agents in the D.C. area, more "extreme" trimmings are sometimes little more than distractions to buyers.
"Sometimes we will do something a little unusual," said Laura Fall, owner of Fall Properties in Arlington. "But we don't do anything too extravagant."
For an example, Fall pointed to her Metro-themed event. In October, Fall held five interconnected open houses on a Sunday. Each of the homes was within walking distance of a Metrorail station, and Fall emphasized this connection in her ads for the five open houses. Fall called it "A Walk to Metro blitz."
But gourmet meals and fine wines? Guests won't find these at a Fall-hosted open house.
"We don't do the giveaways, the high-end food and drink as a practice," she said. "You wonder when you do those what people's motivation is for coming out. Are they coming for the property or the giveaways? This isn't a numbers game. You're not just interested in getting bodies to these events. You want to attract the type of buyer who is ultimately interested in the property. That is the goal, not just big numbers."
Fairweather adds another reason why agents in the region have not embraced the idea of extreme open houses: They cost too much.
"In the resale market, real estate agents don't have the money to do any crazy stuff. It's just not there," she said. "I don't think anyone in our market ever really did the razzle. You get people interested in the gimmicks as opposed to the house when you do that. We instead rely on our real estate colleagues to bring in qualified people. That's what works."
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