Do open houses work? It depends on what you are asking them to do. Ask "will an open house sell this specific home on Sunday" and the evidence says probably not. Ask "will an open house put me in a room with people who become clients" and the answer is yes, at a rate you can plan around: roughly one client in ten. That rate belongs to agents who treat the afternoon as a business event rather than a favor to the seller.
What the data actually says
NAR's annual Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers is the most-cited source on this question, and the number people pull from it is not the number that answers it. In the 2025 edition, 52% of buyers found the home they bought on the internet and 27% found it through an agent. "Yard sign/open house sign" is one combined row sitting at 4% (all three from Exhibit 3-6). NAR publishes nothing that splits open houses out of that row, which is where most of the argument starts. The full series lives in NAR's research and statistics library.
We measured the supply side ourselves, since nobody else had. Our 49-city study of 13,757 listed open houses found 6.8% of active listings hold one in a given week, and the spread between cities runs a factor of 35. Tight coastal markets sit at the top (Irvine, California at 24.5%) and high-inventory markets at the bottom (Detroit at 0.7%). Expensive listings hold them far more often: 12.8% weekly for homes between $1M and $2M, against 2.4% for homes under $300k.
That 4% gets misread constantly. It does not mean open houses are useless. It means most buyers who walk into one already found the property somewhere else. They come to check whether the photos told the truth, or to walk the block, or to see the place without booking a showing and starting a conversation with an agent. The visit still counts. It just is not usually where the buyer first met the listing.
Agents care about a different number: how many people in that room turn into clients. That one is harder to measure, which is part of why the argument never settles.
The seller's question vs. the agent's question
Conflating these two causes most of the confusion.
The seller's question is: will an open house help sell my home faster or for more money? One national study says yes, and its own publisher says do not read it that way. Nothing newer has replaced it. Price, condition, location and marketing reach all do more work than any weekend event. The honest answer to a seller is that the open house is unlikely to decide the outcome, and it will not hurt a well-prepared home in an active market.
The agent's question is: will an open house produce leads worth three to four hours of a Sunday? A room of people shopping for a home in person is a prospecting setting no ad platform reproduces. A buyer at an open house selected themselves. They got dressed, drove somewhere, and walked in. That is a different person from the one who tapped an ad on the couch.
The agent's return on an open house depends almost entirely on what happens before (promotion) and after (follow-up). The event in the middle is just the excuse.
Are open houses worth it? The evidence to bring to that conversation
The seller's version of that question usually arrives with an article attached. Four things are worth knowing before you answer it.
The statistic in that article does not measure open houses. Nobody publishes an offer rate for open houses. The pro-open-house figure agents like to quote back is seven years old and its own author warned against using it that way. And the one measured number that speaks to the agent's side has nothing to do with whether this house sells on Sunday.
Disclosure, because this page argues a position and sells something. We make OpenHouse, a sign-in app for iPhone and iPad, so we have an interest in agents holding open houses. Every figure below comes from NAR, Zillow Group or Redfin, with the exhibit or page named, so you can check each one without taking our word for it.
The 4% figure, and what NAR actually publishes
The line your seller read is some version of "only about 4% of buyers found the home they purchased through a yard sign or open house sign." That number is real and it is current. It does not measure open houses.
It comes from Exhibit 3-6 of NAR's 2025 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers, titled "Where Buyer Found the Home They Purchased, 2001-2025." The category is "Yard sign/open house sign," counted as one line. It sat at 4% in 2025. NAR publishes no open-house-only split of that 4%, in this edition or any other, so an article presenting it as an open house conversion rate has invented the attribution.
Two figures from the same report rarely make it into those articles. 48% of buyers used an open house as an information source during their search (Exhibit 3-2), and that 48% is identical for first-time buyers and repeat buyers, which is unusual in a report where most rows split between the two. Among buyers rating the sources they used, 43% called the open house very useful (Exhibit 3-4).
There is also a narrower version of the skeptic's claim that is true, and conceding it up front makes the rest of your answer credible: 3% of buyers said visiting open houses was the first step they took in the home-buying process, against 46% who started by looking online (Exhibit 3-1). An open house sits in the middle of a search rather than at the front of one.
The report was published November 4, 2025, from 6,103 responses covering transactions between July 2024 and June 2025. Its remaining open house exhibits, including the 59% of listing agents who held one, sit alongside the mechanics in how open houses work start to finish.
Do open houses lead to offers? No public dataset answers that
As of September 3, 2026, no MLS, portal, brokerage or trade body publishes the share of open houses that produce an offer. The gap is structural. An open house exists in the MLS as its own dated record. The contract records who bought. Nothing joins those two records, so the rate cannot be computed from public data even by someone with full MLS access.
NAR's question is a different question. It asks where a buyer found the home they purchased, not whether the person who eventually bought had walked through that home's open house. A buyer can find a listing online, attend its open house on Sunday, and write the offer that evening, and NAR counts that buyer under "internet."
Percentages do circulate. Four in wide circulation: a 2.5% visitor-to-client conversion rate, a 5% to 9% range, "65% of open house visitors transact within three months," and "open house leads convert 45% better than online leads." Each turns up on coaching blogs and statistics-aggregator sites with no sample size, no field period and no methodology attached. Treat all four as unsourced. The same applies to any national average of visitors or sign-ins per event: attendance is reported to no central body, so every figure quoted for it is one brokerage's internal count.
Who writes the articles telling sellers to skip the open house
Check the byline before you argue with the article. Of the six pages ranking for "are real estate open houses worth it" on September 3, 2026, four are published by companies whose business is buying homes for cash or routing sellers to cash buyers.
Opendoor is the clearest case, and it says so on the page itself. Its article on whether open houses are worth it states that "Opendoor's cash offer skips showings and open houses entirely", a sentence that appears several times in the piece (last updated May 19, 2026). HomeGo, iBuyer.com and Mill City Home Buyers publish similar articles and sell or arrange cash offers to homeowners.
None of that makes the articles wrong. It does mean a seller quoting one is quoting a cash buyer, and confirming that takes ten seconds on an About page. Say it plainly when a seller forwards you one, then name your own interest in the same breath. An agent who declares the bias on both sides of the table wins that exchange.
The price-premium study you should not quote to a seller
Agents arguing the other direction reach for one figure: homes with open houses sell for $9,046 more and spend seven fewer days on market. Check the date before you use it. It comes from Redfin's analysis of 2018 listings, published April 22, 2019 and last updated October 6, 2020. That is pre-pandemic data, and no national study has replaced it since.
Redfin warned against the causal reading inside the same article: "just because homes with open houses spend more time on the market in certain metros doesn't mean the open house is causing the extended time on the market." The explanation it gives runs backwards from the way the figure gets used. "When a home seller and their agent know a property is going to be a challenge to sell, they do everything they can to make it easy for buyers to see it." Harder listings attract more marketing, and an open house is marketing.
Hand a seller $9,046 and one of two things happens. They believe you, and your credibility now rests on a seven-year-old correlation the publisher disowned in its own text. Or they check the source, and you have lost the rest of the conversation.
What open houses measurably do for the agent
One number on the agent's side of this is measured, repeated annually, and almost never quoted. Zillow Group Population Science's 2025 Consumer Housing Trends Report for Agents asks buyers and sellers how they first found their agent. In 2024:
- 5% of buyers and 5% of sellers attended an open house and met the agent or broker there.
- 6% of buyers and 4% of sellers saw contact information on a For Sale or open house sign.
Those rows barely move across the three years the report prints side by side. Buyers who met their agent at an open house ran 5%, 4% and 5% for 2022, 2023 and 2024. Sellers ran 5%, 5% and 5%. Add the sign row and roughly one client in ten traces back to open house or sign exposure, year after year. The buyer figures come from a survey of more than 5,000 respondents fielded between March and July 2024, the seller figures from about 9,500 responses collected between April and July 2024.
That is the straight answer to whether real estate open houses are effective. They work as a client acquisition channel running at around a tenth of an agent's business, steadily, and they do not work as a mechanism for selling the specific house you are standing in. Whether that tenth actually lands depends on what you do after Sunday, which is the subject of turning open house visitors into clients.
One more line from the same report belongs in the seller conversation. The typical seller holds two open houses, and 22% of sellers said they attended open houses of comparable homes to help set their own listing price. The seller asking whether open houses are worth it has a decent chance of having used one to price the home you are about to list.
Open house tips for sellers: the four decisions that change the outcome
Search results for that phrase are mostly cleaning checklists. Declutter, deep clean, bake something, leave the house. That advice is fine and it does not move the result. Four decisions do, and three of them happen before anyone opens the door.
Price against the comparables the seller has already seen. In Zillow's 2024 seller data, 57% consulted an agent on price, 45% used a Zestimate, another 45% used a different online valuation tool, and 22% walked open houses of similar homes. Your seller arrives anchored to something. An open house on an overpriced listing produces a room of people who leave without an offer, and a seller who concludes the format is broken.
Hold it inside the listing's first week. A new listing gets its largest audience in the first days on market, when saved searches and portal alerts fire. Hold the open house then and it reaches the biggest crowd it will ever reach. Day and hour matter as well, which we measured separately in the best time to hold an open house.
Put the expectation in writing before the event. Agree with the seller in advance, on paper, on what a good outcome looks like: groups through the door, feedback themes, and whether an offer is a realistic target for this listing at this price. Settle the representation question too, because the written buyer agreement practice changes that took effect on August 17, 2024 reshaped the door conversation. What the NAR settlement changed for open houses covers that side.
Report back before the seller has to ask. A seller who hears nothing after an open house concludes that nothing happened. Written feedback beats a phone call you both half remember, and an open house feedback form gives you the raw material for it. Our own open house seller report is one way to package it, and any consistent format does the job.
What to say when a seller asks whether the open house is worth it
Bring three things and stop there.
First, the format has a real audience: 48% of buyers used an open house during their search, and 43% of those who used one called it very useful (NAR, 2025 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers).
Second, you are not promising an offer. No dataset shows an open house causes a sale or a higher price, and the study people quote for the price claim ran on 2018 listings and carries the publisher's own warning against reading it causally.
Third, name your interest: about one client in ten finds their agent at an open house or from a sign (Zillow, 2024). Saying that out loud costs you nothing and it is the reason the format survives.
Wording you can adapt to your market:
"An open house will probably not sell this house by itself. Almost half of buyers use them while they are searching, so it puts your home in front of people who are actively looking, and it gets me honest feedback on the price in the first week. I will hold two, both inside the first three weeks, and you will get a written summary after each one. If the first one tells us the price is wrong, I will say so and we will change the plan."
If the seller's real worry is that the last one drew nobody, that is an attendance problem with its own fixes, covered in what to do when nobody comes to an open house.
When open houses work well
Tight markets with real buyer demand. Where inventory is short and buyers compete, an open house draws a crowd that already wants to buy. The cities at the top of our 49-city table are tight coastal metros. The ones at the bottom are high-inventory markets where listings compete for scarce buyers. More people through the door means more conversations, and better odds that one of them is serious or knows someone who is.
Agents building a local presence. For anyone newer to a neighborhood, an open house is the fastest way to meet it. Neighbors come out of curiosity and list with you two years later. Local buyers without an agent walk in and hire one. When an experienced agent says open houses built their business, this is what they mean. The room led to other business.
Distinctive or sharply priced properties. A home priced keenly, or with a feature that photographs well and has to be stood in to understand (a view, an odd floor plan, an outdoor room), or in a sought-after school district, draws qualified visitors. The open house is doing real marketing work there. A generic home priced high in a slow market will not pull a crowd no matter what you do.
When the event is actually advertised. An open house nobody hears about is an afternoon alone in someone else's living room. Paid social, MLS scheduling, signage on the approach roads, a knock on forty neighbors' doors: all of it moves the headcount. The tactics that drive open house attendance deserve more of your week than the event itself.
When open houses don't work
Seller-only metrics. Score the afternoon on "did this home go under contract because of it" and almost every open house fails. Homes that sell fast after one usually had offers forming through private showings at the same time. The open house ran alongside the sale rather than causing it.
No lead capture or follow-up. An open house without a sign-in is event planning. You meet people, they leave, you never hear from them again. Agents who say open houses "don't work" often mean they ran one with no system behind it. The conversion happens in Monday's phone call, and Monday's phone call needs a name and a number. The Close's roundup of open house apps makes the same point less politely, describing the alternative as "messy paper sign-in sheets."
This is where open house lead capture stops being a logistical detail and becomes the point. A visitor who signs in is a lead. A visitor who doesn't is a pleasant conversation you'll never have again.
Poorly prepared homes. A cluttered, badly lit, casually priced property just gives more people the chance to form a bad impression at once. Staging matters more for an open house than for a private showing, because no agent is there to steer each visitor past the problem.
Markets with no buyers in them. Where few serious buyers are active, attendance drops no matter how hard you advertise. An open house cannot manufacture demand that is not there. Note that this is the opposite of low inventory. Scarce listings and hungry buyers is the condition open houses do best in.
The lead capture gap that costs agents the most
Every visitor who walks in without signing in represents a real cost: a name, a contact, a potential client, gone. Agents know this, but sign-in friction is real. A paper clipboard discourages reluctant visitors and produces illegible handwriting. A generic form on a tablet works, but it's not designed for the format and can stall at the lock screen or lose data on a dead-Wi-Fi connection.
The questions matter as much as the capture. Past name, email and phone, the ones that earn their place ask about timeline, whether the visitor already has an agent, and where they stand on financing. Those three separate a buyer who needs representation inside 30 days from a neighbor who came to see the kitchen. The right questions to ask at sign-in works through the wording.
A sign-in a visitor can finish in under a minute, on one screen, turns a browser into a lead. A sign-in that reads like a form they never agreed to fill in loses them at the door. Kiosk mode on a dedicated iPad, one clean screen, and a tone that reads professional instead of pushy are the mechanics that close the gap.
Offline reliability is the failure most agents only price in after it has cost them. Dead-Wi-Fi listings are ordinary: the luxury building whose elevator lobby eats signal, the condo midrise at peak hours, the rural property with one bar. If the sign-in needs a connection, the visitors who arrive during the drop simply vanish. An app that writes to the device first and never places a network call removes that failure mode.
Offline support is a genuine point of difference between products, and the roundups do list it. Highnote's best open house apps marks Curb Hero and Open Home Pro as working offline. Showable's guide to sign-in apps notes that several apps collect registrations without a connection and sync once the device is back online. Read the fine print on each one, because "syncs later" and "never needs the network" fail in different ways.
The follow-up gap that costs agents even more
Most open house leads go cold for a dull reason. The follow-up was slow, or generic, or never happened. No controlled study fixes the window at 24 hours, so treat that rule as practitioner convention rather than a finding. The logic behind it is hard to argue with. The visitor has just walked the house, they remember your face, and the conversation is still in their head.
A call or text the next day that quotes the conversation back ("you mentioned the school district, and I have two listings you haven't seen") does more than a template email on Wednesday. The sign-in is the setup. The call is the close.
Agents who say open houses built their client base tend to describe the same unglamorous routine: same-day notes on what each visitor said, a call or a personal text inside 24 hours, and one place that records where every lead stands. The system does not have to be clever. It has to exist.
A well-run open house checklist puts the follow-up steps on the same page as setup and teardown. Agents who treat Monday's calls as part of the event are the ones for whom open houses work.
What 2026 looks like
Four things about the format have shifted in the last two years.
Buyer agency at the door. The written buyer agreement practice changes that took effect on August 17, 2024 pushed the representation conversation earlier, and the door of an open house is now often where it starts. What you have to say varies by state and by brokerage policy, so read your commission's guidance and your broker's rather than a national summary. The practical effect is that the greeting carries more weight than it did.
Online-first discovery. Buyers in 2026 have usually seen the listing, toured it virtually, and formed an opinion before they walk in. The visit confirms rather than discovers. So spend less of the conversation explaining the house and more of it working out where the visitor actually is.
Inventory cycles. Open house value moves with inventory. In tight markets they draw real traffic. In high-inventory markets there are too many competing opens and not enough buyers to fill them. Your local conditions are the first filter on whether a weekend is worth building around.
Digital alternatives. Virtual tours and 3D walkthroughs are standard now, and some buyers use them to skip the open house. That leaves you with visitors who chose to come. They are self-selecting for the home or for meeting an agent face to face, and both beat a passive online view.
The net picture: open houses haven't become obsolete, but they've become more work to execute well. The agents for whom they still work have adapted the before and after more than they've changed the event itself.
A realistic framework for deciding
Before you commit a Sunday, run the listing through this:
| Factor | Higher value | Lower value |
|---|---|---|
| Market conditions | Active buyer demand, limited inventory | Slow market, excess inventory |
| Property type | Distinctive, photogenic, well-priced | Generic, overpriced, or problematic to show |
| Your goals | Building local presence, generating leads | Seller expectation management only |
| Promotion plan | Digital ads, signs, neighbor outreach, MLS | "We'll put a sign out" |
| Sign-in system | Digital, offline-capable, with follow-up flow | Paper clipboard, no follow-up plan |
| Follow-up system | Same-day notes, 24-hour personal outreach | Email-only, days later |
Agents who get steady returns from open houses score high on most rows. Agents who report that open houses don't work usually score low on promotion and follow-up, and high on "I did it because the seller asked."
Attendance problems and value problems are different problems with different fixes. If the last one drew nobody, you have the first kind, and that one is fixable before you write off the format.
If you do go, bring a sign-in that doesn't lose people, capture enough detail to make Monday's call worth taking, and then make the call. That combination is what makes open houses work.
Frequently asked questions
Do open houses actually sell houses?
Rarely on their own. In NAR's 2025 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers, 3% of buyers said visiting open houses was the first step they took in the buying process, against 46% who started by looking online (Exhibit 3-1). Most serious buyers are already working with an agent by the time they walk in. An open house does more for an agent's client pipeline than for the sale of the house it is held in.
Are open houses worth the time for agents?
It depends on the measure. If the measure is "did this home sell at the open house," the answer is usually no. If it is "did I meet people who become clients," Zillow Group Population Science's 2025 Consumer Housing Trends Report for Agents puts roughly one client in ten as tracing back to an open house or a For Sale or open house sign. Those hours pay off when the follow-up is consistent.
How many leads does the average open house generate?
No public dataset answers that. Open house attendance is reported to no central body, so any national average you see for visitors or sign-ins per event is one brokerage's internal count. The number swings with market, price point, day of week, and how hard the event was advertised. Your own last ten events are a better benchmark than any published figure.
What's the best way to capture open house leads?
A digital sign-in that works offline so you never lose a lead to a dead-Wi-Fi listing, captures enough contact detail for real follow-up, and doesn't put third-party branding in front of your visitors. Follow-up within 24 hours matters more than which app you picked.
Do buyers have to sign in at an open house?
No law requires a visitor to sign in, and a visitor can decline. Most agents ask as a professional courtesy and as a condition of touring the home. What you have to disclose at the door is set by your state real-estate commission and your brokerage policy, so check both rather than relying on a national rule of thumb.
What makes an open house fail?
Poor promotion, no follow-up afterwards, a sign-in process that puts visitors off, and no plan for the leads who do walk in. The event itself is rarely the problem. The before and after usually are.
Do open houses lead to offers?
No public dataset answers that. As of September 3, 2026, no MLS, portal, brokerage or trade body publishes the share of open houses that produce an offer. An open house is its own dated MLS record and the contract records who bought, but nothing joins the two records, so the rate cannot be computed from public data. NAR measures where a buyer found the home they purchased, which is a different question.
Are real estate open houses effective?
They are effective at finding clients rather than at selling the specific house. Zillow Group Population Science's 2025 Consumer Housing Trends Report for Agents reports that in 2024, 5% of buyers and 5% of sellers first found their agent by attending an open house and meeting them there, plus 6% of buyers and 4% of sellers who saw contact information on a For Sale or open house sign. Roughly one client in ten traces back to that exposure, and the rate held flat across 2022, 2023 and 2024.
Do homes with open houses sell for more money?
The figure people quote, $9,046 more and seven fewer days on market, comes from Redfin's analysis of 2018 listings, published April 22, 2019. Redfin's own article warns against reading it causally and explains that agents do more marketing on homes they expect to be hard to sell. No national study has replaced it, so anyone presenting that premium as current is quoting pre-pandemic data.