Another issue to consider whether you do allow open houses is safety. It didn’t use to be this way, but things have changed. There are individuals and groups (not honest people) that scour the newspapers for open houses. And these people have no intention of purchasing your home. Their sold purpose in to pilfer your home of anything they can easily carry. They could also be casing for a future burglary. Your agent in conducting an open house has all of the best intentions, but in many cases they can’t control it. How does it work? Individuals will enter the home as prospective buyers or in groups and will pretend not to know each other. There could be 10 or 15 people that show up almost at once. The poor agent just can not watch them all. Usually one will entice the agent into a conversation and that is all that is needed to divert the agent’s attention to the others. What are they after? It is anything they conceived of value that they can easily conceal. One their favorites are prescription drugs found in the medicine cabinet, jewelry, papers laying around with credit card numbers and they will look in drawers too. So if you do have an open house, make sure you take the proper precautions. Lock-up valuables and put them in a safe place or at least take them with you while you are out of the home. Even if you don’t have an open house there are still other safety precautions one should take after listing your home for sale. Please take a look at these safety tips.

After you have signed the listing contract with your agent to sell your property, you have some decisions to make. One of those is do you want your agent to conduct open houses. The obvious answer probably is- sure why not- the more the merrier. It will give my home more exposure and help sell it quickly. But maybe you might think about this. Once your agent lists your home on the multiple listing service (MLS), your home now is now being seen world wide. Why is that? It’s the internet. Never before have homes for sale enjoyed this new medium for exposure. There are many national organizations that have websites that allow users to search for property available for sale. They all have agreements with each MLS to receive feeds from those MLSs. And don’t forget each agent that has a website, also receives those same feeds that also gives the user the ability to search for property too. So do open houses really accomplish much? Not really. Has a visitor ever purchase a home from an open house? The answer is yes, not often though. But not to look contradictory, consider this. That buyer most likely is already represented by a real estate agent. The home most likely was already going to be shown by their agent. The first rule in selling your home is to make it available. That usually means having a lock box on the property. You can also make it available without a lock box. Rule #2 is, you want “quality buyers” in your home, not just looky-loos spending a Sunday afternoon fooling around. There is another reason in considering open houses and that is safety. More of those issues in Part 2.