Showing a Home: Private Viewings, Brokers Tours & Open Houses

As a listing agent, there are various marketing strategies available to use when selling a home including private viewings, hosting Broker tours, and planning open house events. If you’ve ever bought or sold a home, you’re familiar with private viewings. These happen when a realtor brings a potential buyer to a home to see the property. 

If you were the buyer, you let your realtor know which homes you’d like to see. The realtor would coordinate a day and time to meet and walk-through each listing. 

And if you were the seller, these private viewings are when you, your family, and any pets you have would leave the home so the potential buyer and agent could come to see your place. 

But what happens at a Brokers tour and at an open house? How are these different than private viewings?

An Inside Peek at Broker Tours

When a newly listed home hits the market, this is the perfect time to host a Brokers tour. These types of showings allow agents and brokers an exclusive opportunity to see a home in ways that listing photos can’t portray. The agents in attendance may have in mind some qualified buyers actively looking for a home. The multi-hour gathering of agents will be given the opportunity to ask the selling agent specific questions as well as share feedback on the home—which is most beneficial to understand how the home is being perceived by prospective buyers and real estate colleagues.

These planned tours with light refreshments are often scheduled during a weekday when real estate professionals aren’t showing homes to their clients during peak weekend and evening hours. Hosting a Brokers tour is an effective marketing strategy to gain increased exposure for a listing and increased offers often follow these events. 

Impactful Benefits to Brokers Tours

By generating early interest and attracting qualified buyers, these events can potentially shorten the time it takes to sell a property. Each real estate professional that attends one of these tours has a vast network of clients, colleagues, and networking peers. 

This is an opportunity to catch up with other professionals and talk shop about their listings, your listings, and what your clients are seeking. You never know who may have a listing about to come onto market that checks all the boxes for what your client is hoping to find in their future home. 

Realtors find themselves working with one another frequently as we represent our clients—in roles as either a listing agent or a buying agent. In our networking circles, we learn if a specific agent may be drawn to representing homes in specific neighborhoods or architectural styles which is helpful when a client desires homes meeting these criteria.

Join Us at an Open House

Open houses are similar to Broker tours but these events are open to the general public. This multi-hour weekend or evening event is planned at a time outside of typical working hours when all family members interested in touring a home can be present. 

The listing agent will advertise this event and have light refreshments available as well as listing brochures. Those in attendance can range from qualified buyers to neighbors to those who are curious about seeing inside the home. Guests visiting an open house may come with or without their realtor. Those who come without a realtor may later schedule another visit of the home with their realtor to take a second look. Often following an open house an increase in offers will be received.

Let’s Plan to Show Your Home

When you’re ready to list your home, I invite you to give me a call. Together we’ll discuss these marketing strategies and put together a plan to reach prospective buyers and those in the real estate network. Both Brokers tours and open houses are effective ways to create excitement and interest around a newly listed or recently reduced home. 

Since 2004 Sara Lyn Nguyen continues to bring a wealth of knowledge and expertise about buying and selling real estate around the Houston area to those she serves. Sara is a multi-year award winning REALTOR® and relocation specialist where her clients trust her to have up-to-date information on the real estate market. She has been one of Gary Greene’s Multi-Million Dollar Top Producers, and citywide was the #2 Top Producing agent in 2020, #3 in 2021, and #2 in 2022. When it’s time to buy, sell, invest, or relocate speak with a trusted professional knowledgeable in the homes and neighborhoods of Fort Bend/Sugar Land and the surrounding region.