Converts open-house visitors into clients with door capture, a same-evening first touch, a 3-touch follow-up sequence, and buyer-signal triage by financing and timeline. Use when an agent says "follow up with my open house leads", "what do I send open house visitors", "my sign-in sheet goes nowhere", or "how do I work an open house". Do NOT use for generic B2B follow-up cadences - use sales-followup-cadence instead.
---
name: open-house-follow-up
description: Converts open-house visitors into clients with door capture, a same-evening first touch, a 3-touch follow-up sequence, and buyer-signal triage by financing and timeline. Use when an agent says "follow up with my open house leads", "what do I send open house visitors", "my sign-in sheet goes nowhere", or "how do I work an open house". Do NOT use for generic B2B follow-up cadences - use sales-followup-cadence instead.
---
# Open House Follow-Up
An open house without a follow-up system is unpaid weekend work: the visitors walk out, the sign-in sheet goes in a drawer, and the two real buyers in the room hire whichever agent contacts them first. The costly mistake this skill prevents is treating follow-up as optional or slow - the agent who touches a visitor the same evening wins the relationship before competitors even open the sheet.
Worked example throughout: Priya, a residential agent in a suburban market, 14 transactions last year at a $485,000 average sale price, building toward 24. Her Sunday open house at 742 Alder Court (the $499,000 listing from listing-description-writer) draws 11 visitor parties. Realistic yield: 2-3 parties are active buyers, 3-4 are 6-12 months out, the rest are neighbors and browsers. The gap between 14 and 24 transactions closes on the 6-12-month group - and that group is exactly who buyer-nurture-sequence exists for.
## Operating procedure
Order matters: capture quality determines everything downstream, and the same-evening touch decays in value by the hour.
1. **Set up capture at the door.** Digital sign-in (tablet or QR to a form) - paper sheets produce illegible phone numbers and no structure. Require name, mobile, email, and exactly ONE qualifying question: **"Where are you in your search?"** with four options: *actively looking / starting to look / just curious / I live nearby*. One question keeps sign-in friction near zero while splitting the room into workable segments. Greet every party and ask one conversational follow-up ("What are you comparing this one against?") - the answer goes in notes the moment they move on.
2. **Annotate within 30 minutes of closing the door.** For each party: search stage, anything learned about financing or timeline, what they reacted to in the house. Memory of 11 parties is gone by dinner.
3. **Send the same-evening first touch (Touch 1).** Non-negotiable. SMS, before 8 PM, personal and specific - template below. Same-evening beats next-morning because the visit is still emotionally live and because the other agents they met this weekend will not move until Monday.
4. **Run the rest of the 3-touch sequence** (day-2 email, day-5 call).
5. **Triage on every response** using the buyer-signal rules below.
6. **Hand off the not-yet-ready** to buyer-nurture-sequence with their segment and notes - this is the handoff that turns one open house into pipeline for the next year.
## Inputs to collect
- The annotated sign-in export (if the agent ran paper, transcribe it now and switch to digital next time).