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Steven Cross
While the necessity of open homes has been questioned by some members of the industry, others are staunch supporters of the practice.
“Inspections don’t increase buyer demand,” Paul Harrison, franchise sales manager at RealWay Property Consultants in Queensland, told Real Estate Business.
“I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with open home inspections, it’s just that when I was in England and the Middle East there were none, and property was still sold. I’d never even heard of an open home until I moved to Australia.”
Mr Harrison also claimed that removing open home inspections would help create a more attractive career path for young professionals.
“Real estate as an industry is not an attractive employment prospect for most young people. You don’t hear kids walking around saying they want to be an agent," he said.
“That’s because no one wants to work six or seven days a week.
“If the industry accepted that open homes weren’t essential, then we’d see a lot more people considering it as a career, seeing as they could spend time with their family on the weekend.”
Selling principal from LJ Hooker Lithgow Jamie Giokaris doesn’t believe that open home inspections work everywhere.
“We don’t do open for inspections normally. A majority of our inspections are by appointment only, which saves me a lot of time," he said.
Mr Giokaris has been crowned for haveing the top number of sales across the entire LJ Hooker international network in 2012.
“In our marketplace, open homes aren’t heavily attended and if it means I don’t have to run around every Saturday setting everything up, the more prospecting and selling I can do,” he said.
“The target market is working class, so most of my clients are finishing work in the afternoon and sometimes would prefer to drop by a home to inspect before heading home.”
However, in a story published last week, agents roasted an initiative which suggested that open homes should be run by vendors.
"In my agency in Brisbane we do open homes and may get 20 or more through each one a weekend. If that's not competition driving the price of the property up, then I don't know what is," Dianne Deem from Ray White commented.
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