Open House Street Signs

When selling your home, you have to get the word out to buyers in the area. The Internet is a great method for doing that, but open house street signs can work well, too, if your property is in a good, high traffic location.

Open House Street Signs

Part of the selling process for homes in high traffic areas is conducting open houses.  Many sellers cringe at the idea, but having an open house viewing can be important.  Sooner or later, you have to let buyers actually walk though the house.  Consider it a necessary evil, but it is the single best way to find a buyer in some areas.  Indeed, the process is so important that many sellers now employee home staging professionals to whip their houses into shape before the showing.

Part and parcel to an open house are open house street signs.  Are they tacky? Yes.  Do you really need to put them up all over the neighborhood?  Yes.  Do they work?  Yes, if there is a lot of traffic by your property.  Open houses and street signs advertising them can be critical when it comes to getting buyers to your home.  It doesn't tend to work well in the boonies, but it's one of the sales staples in many urban areas. 

Sign up for Newsletter

Once you have committed to conducting an open house for potential buyers, you need to get the word out. While there are lots of interesting strategies to do this, tradition carries the day in this area with basic open house signs. So, where do you get them and where do you post them?

You can purchase open house street signs at most hardware stores including Home Depot, Lowes or your favorite place to buy supplies for weekend projects. Do not buy just one. You want to canvas your area with multiple signs, so plan how many you need before going to the store.

The number and placement of signs is entirely dependent on your neighborhood. Obviously, you want to place them on the corners on both ends of your street.  It's probably a good idea to ask neighbors if this okay to avoid any nasty comments.

In addition to your street, you want to place signs on the corners of any major intersections around your neighborhood.  If you just place signs on your street, you are limiting your exposure.  You want to sell the home, which means you need to get the signs out where lots of people will see them. This means major intersections as far as five or six blocks away.

Marketing homes for sale has been revolutionized over the last few years.  Open house street signs, however, are still a great way to get word out in your neighborhood.  So what if you get mainly curiousity seekers.  If they like what they see, they may mention it to a real buyer.  You've got to kiss a lot of frogs!  Once, my husband and I piggy-backed an open house onto a Spring Garden Tour being held in our neighborhood and got a couple of hundred visitors.  Mostly they weren't buyers, but they were interested in homes and gardens, and it caused the kind of buzz we were hoping for. 

Sign up for Newsletter

<< Back to Real Estate Articles