When you’re selling your home, your open house is an opportunity to showcase what you’ve got! Without an open house, a lot of potential buyers may not find their way into your home, and without potential buyers entering and seeing your home for themselves, it’s unlikely you’ll be able to make a sale to a legitimate, qualified buyer. Open houses are a great opportunity for this and you can use the opportunity to not only host an open house but host an open house in style. Below are 10 tips and tricks for hosting your open house in style.
Leave surfaces open
No matter what the architectural style your home is on the outside, leaving flat surfaces as open as possible on the inside creates an immediate effect that is incredibly stylish and aesthetically pleasing.
All coffee tables, end tables, kitchen tables, and bathroom surfaces need to be completely open – or as clear as possible.
Nothing says style like creating a space where what really matters can truly shine. If there’s tons of clutter, you’ll have no room to highlight what is important for potential buyers to view and experience.
This doesn’t just go for surfaces of furniture but the floors as well. Clear as many things off the floors as you can.
Make things sparkling clean
These first two go hand-in-hand. Once you create those open surfaces on the furniture and floors of your home, clean them!
Make the surfaces of the floors sparkle as much as you can. Make sure you remove scuffs and marks whenever possible.
Creating an open house with style requires a solid foundation of cleared space and sparkling cleanliness.
Don’t forget to clean the surfaces of kitchen appliances, all doorknobs, vases, light switches, and shake out any rugs as well.
Furnish with art (sparingly)
Make sure the paintings and art you choose are complementing your home, and use art sparingly. It’s better and certainly more stylish to include 2-3 very beautiful paintings or sculptures in your home than have the walls overdrawn with discount paintings.
A cool idea for keeping your art stylish is looking into bringing in pieces from local artists. You are selling your home in a specific location, and incorporating that location into your open house in any way possible to create a sense of community is not only stylish but good business as well.For instance, if your house is one of the houses for sale in Miami, look into an artist bubbling up in Wynwood and choose some pieces to showcase from them.
Uninvite your furry friends
As much as you and everyone else loves your cat and dog (or your cats and dogs), it’s a bit more stylish to uninvite your furry friends to your open house.
You can ask a friend or family member to babysit them briefly, or alternatively, there are many companies available that take care of your pets during the day for a certain amount of hours or will take care of them overnight.
This helps to make sure the atmosphere is conducive to stylishness for many reasons (one of which is keeping those floors you just cleaned, clean) – but also, nobody wants to have to grab some Benadryl when a potential buyer who is allergic to cats comes in.
Schedule appropriately
Show that you are conscious of what’s going on in your community by scheduling your open house appropriately. Don’t schedule during an obvious large local event, a religious holiday, or a weekday during work hours.
Weekends between lunch and dinner is usually the most common (and most stylish) option.
Include contact information on your marketing materials, and make sure your email isn’t something super informal and unprofessional. You may want to make a separate email specifically for the promotional materials of your home or for your open houses’ promotional materials. It’s not stylish to create marketing materials with a tacky email.
Market accordingly
Speaking of marketing, marketing in style definitely starts with making sure your email address is professional, but also it includes what sort of paper you use, what finish is on the paper, the color scheme, and the design of your materials.
You may want to consider hiring a freelance graphic designer to help you design a very stylish set of materials for your open house.
Include in the package at least a couple of signs – one to put on your front lawn to showcase the date and time of the open house, and one or two to put at the ends of your street to notify drivers and passersby that there is an open house happening on your property.
Incorporate some flowers
While it’s important to keep surfaces very clear, it’s definitely a nice touch of style to include some flowers – again, sparingly.
By the door when potential buyers first enter or one bouquet in the kitchen is enough.
Keep the arrangement very, very simple and choosing a bunch of white flowers only – no colors – will be best.
Provide refreshments
Providing refreshments is always a stylish touch and an open house is no exception.
Use this opportunity to bake some cookies, provide some finger foods, or even offer little glasses of Prosecco if you’re really going for full-fledged style.
Don’t choose anything that can’t be easily carried around and consumed as you want buyers to look around as much as possible and not feel confined to the kitchen.
Create small thank you cards
Creating thank you cards, which can be created along with your marketing materials, is a wonderful, stylish touch to an open house.
Leave them next to the refreshments or even attach them to refreshments, like with a bowl of candy attached to thank you cards.
Thank you cards are a great way to enhance a potential buyers’ experience and make them associate positively with your home – all things that deliver style, and, can also move along the sale of your home.
You can structure the thank you cards a little bit like a business card as well and include your address and contact information, too.
Provide a sleek sign-in book (and a great pen)
Provide a sign-in book at the entry of your home for potential buyers to record that they entered and checked your home out. This is stylish and also critical for following-up. And, showing that you are conscious of following-up is stylish in itself.
A very big part of the experience of using this sign-in book, however, is going to be the pen you put out. For a stylish open house, pick a great one with some good weight and a nice flow to it. A pen can either be tacky and outdated or incredibly stylish. Go for the latter when you can.
Some of these details may seem insignificant, but when potential buyers are checking out a whole group of houses right in the same price range as yours, the differentiating margins become slimmer and slimmer and these little details start to make a huge difference! When you’re looking to host an open house in style, keep these tips and tricks in mind and you are sure to have your property stick out to potential buyers – in a good way!
