Open houses are a waste of your Saturday

Here’s an unpopular opinion for a Saturday morning. Open houses do not exist for you. They exist for the listing agent, who gets a room full of strangers to prospect for future clients. You are the product, not the customer.

Think about what actually happens when you “just stop by” a few open houses this weekend. You see three or four homes that happened to hit the market that week and happened to have their sellers agree to a Sunday showing window. That is not a search. That is whatever the calendar handed you

Meanwhile the home that actually fits what you want, the one priced right, in the right school zone, with the layout you need, sold on Thursday to a buyer whose agent had it on their radar before it hit a public search site.

Second level effect: the open house model trains buyers to shop reactively instead of strategically. You start believing your options are whatever is open this weekend, instead of the full universe of what is actually available or about to be.

Third level effect: without a dedicated agent running your search, you have no one negotiating exclusively for you in that open house room. The agent smiling at the door represents the seller. Full stop. Every question you ask, every number you float, becomes information working against your own leverage.

A buyer’s agent does not wait for Saturday. They are watching new listings the morning they hit MLS, calling on off market and coming soon inventory, and filtering out the noise before it ever wastes your weekend. That is the actual challenge open houses cannot solve: they are built around the seller’s calendar, not your timeline.

If you’re searching for a home right now and doing it open house by open house, let’s talk about what a real search actually looks like, and why you’re wasting your time at open houses.

Peace