Do You Always Need an Open House?

The three jobs an open house actually does

Most of the argument about open houses is unhelpful because both sides are describing something real. “Open houses sell homes” and “open houses are just agent prospecting” are both partly true, and they are true at the same time. It is easier to decide once you separate the jobs.

Job one: it concentrates attention instead of creating it

This is the one people mislabel as “urgency.” An open house does not manufacture demand. What it does is take the demand that already exists — the people who saved your listing on Thursday, the neighbour who has been watching your street, the family whose agent flagged it — and put them in the same rooms in the same two hours.

That concentration changes what a buyer experiences. On a private showing, a buyer sees an empty house and has all the time in the world to think about it. At a busy open house, the same buyer sees other people taking their shoes off at the door, hears someone ask about the roof, and watches a second couple do a slow lap of the kitchen. Nobody had to say a word about competition; the room said it.

The honest limit: if six people come through and none of them are ready, no amount of staging produces a bidding war. Concentration amplifies interest that exists. It cannot invent it. Anyone promising otherwise is selling you something.

Job two: it shows the home in a way photos flatten

Listing photography is very good now, which is precisely the problem — it makes almost every home look similar. What photos consistently fail to carry is flow: how the kitchen opens to the family room, where the light lands at 2 p.m., how much the ceiling height changes the feel of a room, whether the yard is usable or just present, how quiet the street is.

Homes that under-photograph and over-show are the ones that benefit most from an open house. A 1980s Coquitlam split-level with an awkward floor plan often looks confusing in photographs and makes complete sense in ninety seconds in person. A townhome whose best feature is a private green outlook loses that entirely on a phone screen. If your home is one of those, the open house is not marketing fluff — it is the shortest path to being understood.

There is a second effect worth naming: an open house removes friction. Some buyers are not yet at the stage of booking an appointment through an agent, and a fair number of neighbours attend. Neighbours are not time-wasters as often as people assume — they know who wants to move onto the street, and they talk.

Job three: it builds the host’s pipeline — and you should know that

An open house is one of the few settings where an agent regularly meets buyers who do not yet have representation. That is not a scandal. It is how a large part of this business has always worked, and a host who converts an unrepresented visitor into a client has done nothing improper.

What matters to you is the ranking. If an agent is pitching an open house as the centrepiece of your marketing plan, ask what else is in it. If the plan is professional photography, accurate MLS® data, syndication, a considered price, direct outreach to the agents whose buyers fit your home, and an open house on the first weekend, then the open house is one tool among several and it is being used correctly. If the plan is a sign, a Saturday, and enthusiasm, that plan is doing more for the person who wrote it than for you.

The first weekend is the one that counts

In my experience — and consistent with how saved-search alerts and the daily hotsheet actually work — a listing draws its heaviest attention in roughly its first week to ten days. Every buyer already searching your price band and area sees it as new, their agents see it flagged as a new listing, and the saved-search alerts fire. You do not get that first impression back.

So the default is simple: host the open house on the first weekend, while attention is at its peak and the listing is genuinely new to everyone who walks in.

What happens next is a judgement call, and it should be made on evidence rather than habit:

• If interest is still live — run a second one the following weekend. Repeat visitors, second showings booked, agents calling with questions, offers being discussed: that is momentum, and a second open house keeps it in one place instead of letting it leak into a scattered week.
• If the first weekend was quiet — a second open house is not the answer. Two consecutive slow openings usually mean the price, the photography, or the positioning is off. Fix the input rather than repeating the output.

Running two weekends back-to-back also lets you do something quietly valuable: you dictate the showing times. Rather than absorbing whatever requests arrive on whatever evenings, you can point most traffic at defined windows. Buyers who genuinely want in will come to the window. Buyers who need a private appointment still get one — but the default is your schedule, not theirs.

Week five is a different conversation

Here is where an open house stops helping and starts talking.

Once a listing has been on the market for about a month, an open house sign says something the seller did not intend. Serious buyers at that point are working with an agent, they have already seen the listing, and if they were interested they would have booked a private showing. What an open house on a stale listing tends to attract is lookers — neighbours, people casually curious, buyers a year away from moving. That traffic feels like activity and produces almost nothing.

Meanwhile, the buyers who are paying attention read the signal. A home that has been available for weeks and is suddenly holding open houses again is not communicating confidence.

If you are at day thirty with no offers, the problem is rarely exposure — most active buyers in your price band have already seen the home. It is one of three things: price, presentation, or positioning (the wrong buyer being targeted, or a genuine objection like a busy road or a dated kitchen that has not been priced in). Those get fixed with a pricing decision, better photography, or a repositioned launch — not with another Saturday. I have written more about reading those signals in how showings work and why some homes don’t sell.

What the data actually shows

I am not aware of a Canadian survey that cleanly measures how many buyers found their home through an open house, so the most-quoted numbers come from the United States. They describe a different market with different rules, and should be read as directional only.

In the National Association of REALTORS® 2025 Home Buyers and Sellers Generational Trends Report, 49% of buyers used an open house as one of their information sources during the search — more than used online video, fewer than used a real estate agent (86%). But when the same buyers were asked where they first found the home they actually purchased, 4% credited a yard sign or open house sign, against 51% who found it on the internet and 29% through their agent.

Read those two numbers together and you get a fair picture. Roughly half of buyers walk through open houses while they are shopping. Very few are introduced to their eventual home that way. That is exactly what you would expect from a tool whose job is to concentrate and demonstrate rather than to discover — and it is a good argument for running one at the right moment rather than out of habit.

When you probably do not need one

An open house is a default worth questioning. These are the situations where I would either skip it or think hard first.

If you are selling and buying, you should not be in the room

This is the part of open house strategy that gets almost no attention, and it is the one that matters most to move-up sellers — which is most of my clients in Coquitlam, Port Moody and Port Coquitlam.

If you are selling your current home and buying your next one, the two jobs compete for exactly the same hours. The open house wants your Saturday. So does every home worth seeing in your next price band, because those homes are also being shown on weekends — and in a market where the right listing appears and moves quickly, waiting until the following week is a real cost.

Being on a team helps here. A teammate can host your open house while you and I spend that same Saturday looking at your next home. Your listing gets a licensed professional at the door who greets every visitor, answers questions accurately, captures feedback and reports back. Your search keeps moving instead of waiting a week. Two jobs, two people, same afternoon.

You also get a cleaner debrief. The host has no stake in flattering their own showing, so the feedback you hear on Sunday is the feedback that was actually given — including the unflattering parts, which is usually where the useful information lives.

Where this fits in the bigger sequencing question — whether you list first or buy first at all — is covered in the Coquitlam Move-Up Protocol and sell first or buy first.

What BC rules actually require

Three things come up constantly at open houses, and the real rules are more reasonable than the folklore.

You do not have to sign in

No law requires you to sign in. Under BC’s Personal Information Protection Act, an organization must generally obtain consent to collect and use personal information, may only use it for purposes “that a reasonable person would consider appropriate,” and must disclose the purpose of collection on or before collecting it. In practice: you can ask what the information will be used for, and you can decline to give it. The one caveat is that this is somebody’s private home — the seller and the host are entitled to set conditions of entry, and some will ask for identification for security reasons.

From the seller’s side, a sign-in sheet is still worth having — it is a rough record of who came through, and it matters for security. Just do not expect it to be complete.

The agent at the door does not represent you

The host is working for the seller. BCFSA is clear that a professional may host an open house or answer general factual questions without first providing the Disclosure of Representation in Trading Services form — but that changes the moment the conversation turns personal. In BCFSA’s wording, professionals may host open houses or give general factual responses “unless they receive or solicit confidential information (such as the consumer’s motivations or financial qualifications) as part of these activities.” And if the discussion does turn to a consumer’s motivations or financial qualifications, the professional should “pause the discussion and provide the Disclosure of Representation in Trading Services form and, if appropriate, the Disclosure of Risks to Unrepresented Parties form, as required by the Rules.”

Practical translation for buyers: asking about the roof age is fine. Volunteering your budget, your timeline or how much you love the house is information that goes back to the seller. Stay factual until you have decided how you want to be represented.

Tenanted homes have their own rules

If your home is rented, showings are governed by the Residential Tenancy Act, and the Province’s preferred route is agreement rather than notice: “A written agreement outlining the open house terms and schedule is the best way to prevent or resolve any concerns.” Failing that, the landlord must give 24 hours’ written notice for each showing, stating the reason and a time between 8 a.m. and 9 p.m. unless the tenant agrees otherwise. With proper notice the showing can proceed even if the tenant is not home, and the tenant may choose to be present.

Three further points that sellers routinely miss. The Province does not prohibit open houses in tenanted homes, but it advises landlords to be aware of the tenant’s right to quiet enjoyment and to “avoid holding multiple open houses in a short period.” During showings, the landlord or their agent “is required to ensure the safety of the tenant’s possessions.” And if a tenant refuses entry, or a landlord schedules an unreasonable number of open houses, either side can apply for dispute resolution. In practice a cooperative tenant is worth far more than a technically compliant one — see tenant rights at sale in BC.

The seller’s pre-open-house checklist

If you are running one, run it properly. The gap between a good open house and a careless one is mostly preparation.

• Secure everything portable. Prescription medication first — it is a common target and the easiest thing to forget. Then jewellery, cash, small electronics, spare keys, chequebooks, passports and anything with your account numbers on it. Take them with you; do not just move them to a drawer.
• Clear the paper. Mail, tax documents, financial statements and anything showing your movements or your employer.
• Deal with the pets. Not in a bedroom with a sign on the door. Out of the house.
• Turn on every light and open every blind — including on a bright day. Rooms photograph and read brighter than they are, and buyers notice dim corners.
• Set the temperature deliberately. Cool in summer, warm in winter. Comfort keeps people in the house longer.
• Skip the strong scents. Plug-ins and candles read as concealment. Clean and aired is better than fragrant.
• Agree the hours in advance. Two hours is standard and generally enough. Longer sessions dilute the traffic and undercut the concentration effect that makes the open house work.
• Leave. Sellers present at their own open house make buyers self-conscious, and buyers who feel watched do not linger, open closets or picture themselves living there.
• Ask for the debrief in writing. How many groups, how many were working with an agent, what they said about the price, what they said about the home, and what happened afterwards.

What this market changes

Conditions matter to this decision, and right now they favour patience over theatre.

In July 2026, Coquitlam’s sales-to-active listings ratio was 11.3% for detached homes, 19.7% for townhomes and 15.3% for apartments, on Greater Vancouver REALTORS® data. The Coquitlam detached benchmark was $1,627,600, down 5.2% year over year; the townhome benchmark was $990,900, down 8.6%; the apartment benchmark was $651,400, down 7.2%.

Detached buyers, in other words, have choice. When buyers have choice, three things follow for open house strategy. Competition among buyers is harder to generate, so the concentration effect is weaker — do not price on the assumption it will show up. The demonstration job gets more important, because when a buyer has eight comparable homes to walk through, the one they understood best is the one they remember. And the first weekend matters more than ever, because a listing that does not distinguish itself early joins the pile of inventory buyers scroll past.

The townhome segment is meaningfully tighter than detached, which is worth knowing if that is your product. Current numbers are refreshed monthly on the Tri-Cities market update.

The short version

• First weekend: yes. That is when the listing is new to everyone.
• Second weekend: only if the first one produced something real. Momentum is worth holding; repetition without evidence is not.
• After about a month: no. Serious buyers have an agent and book privately. Fix price, presentation or positioning instead.
• Tenanted, secure, remote or highly private homes: usually no. Use scheduled private showings.
• Selling and buying at once: yes — hosted by a teammate, while you spend the day looking at your next home.
• Any open house at all: only alongside a real marketing plan. On its own it is a sign on a lawn.

Common questions