Fritz Frigan at Halstead has been conducting this open house survey:
Here are the numbers from last weekend. We received 147 responses, better than the weekend prior, but far from desired 10% goals. There were 3468 open houses scheduled in NYC for last Sunday, according to StreetEasy.
It seems that second half of August and the first half of July are the worst time to hold an open house. It is slow!! Here is the dataset. 2.68 on average in all of NYC, 8% slower than weekend before. 24 open houses with zero attendance, or 16.3%. When most visited open house had just 11 attendees, yes, it was slow! Straight to the highlights:
· Manhattan slipped again, this time to 2.37 average per open house. Not once since July 1 was the Manhattan average above 3. Harlem (4.08) and Midtown East (3.41) were somewhat busy and above the average. UWS (2.71) slightly above the average and UES was VERY slow! Just 1.77 per open house.
· Brooklyn improved a bit to 5.78, but we are still suffering from too few data points from Brooklyn. Just 9 open houses received. Park Slope and Other Areas were busy.
· The Bronx was slow with just 2.27 per open house and solid 15 open houses submitted.
· Queens was similar to last weekend with 3.50 per open house. We need more brokers to participate!
· Size – most traffic at Multi-Unit buildings, Townhouses and 5BRs, but beware of low sample sizes. At “normal” apartments, the busiest were 2BR open houses with 2.89 on average.
· Price – Under $500K category was the only to break 3 attendees on average. Actually 3M+ category had 4 on average, but with just two open houses submitted.
· Just 37% premium for the traffic at first open house. I do not think that second half of August is a good time to put your exclusives on the market.
I heard from a few of you commenting that many agents are away and some have placed their property in TOM status, because how slow the August was, with hope and message that after Labor Day we will see more properties coming to the market and stronger participation in this survey. Any comments?
I wanted to share with you my very unscientific attempt to quantify the number of buyers that were out looking last Sunday. Early this year, I polled Halstead agents and brokers and asked them: “To how many open houses you bring your buyers, when you show properties on Sundays?” The average came to roughly 3.5. So, assumption was made that average buyer attends between 3 and 4 open houses on each weekend they go out.
We know that last Sunday there were 3468 open houses scheduled, which implies there were 9294 open houses visits. If each buyer visited on average 3.5 open houses, it means there were roughly 2655 buyers actively looking last Sunday. Margin of error? Huge! :). Let me know your thoughts of this very crude analysis.
Best of luck this coming Sunday! Send me your data and encourage your colleagues to do the same.
Fritz
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