“We’re out dreaming today,” Kevin Schultz, 33, said recently after looking at a house listed at $1.68 million on 13th Street in Park Slope. “But we’re not buying anything yet. And we’re not really going to buy that one, either.”
Mr. Schultz had attended an open house, one of the more bizarre rituals in real estate, whereby otherwise privacy-obsessed New Yorkers invite complete strangers into their homes to inspect their fixtures and moldings, their bedrooms and bathrooms, and — eek — their closets, all in the hope that one of those wanderers will serendipitously, and with must-have-this-now immediacy, fall in love and write a check so big it makes their hand tremble.
For the seller, it’s usually a long shot: dozens may nibble, few will bite. None of this is news to brokers, who have long understood that many of the people they welcome into other peoples’ homes are just gawking, walking by or simply digesting a nice Sunday brunch.
“It’s a form of entertainment,” said Michele Kleier, the president of Gumley Haft Kleier and a regular on the reality TV show “Selling New York.” “It’s cheaper than Broadway.”
Indeed, some brokers say that open houses are basically client Kabuki — an antiquated pantomime meant to convince sellers that they’re working for their commission.
“Open houses, quite frankly, have become obsolete,” said Richard Steinberg, the executive managing director of Warburg Realty.
Statistics bear that out: a 2011 survey by the National Association of Realtors found that fewer than half of American home buyers use an open house in the search. The organization attributes this to the growing sophistication of real estate Web sites, which allow buyers to sift through thousands of listings and mounds of financial data before hitting the streets.
But Mr. Steinberg thinks that buyers have adapted to new technology and browsing strategies more quickly than sellers, who still want to know their brokers are “out pounding the pavement.”
Virtual viewings don’t seem to register with sellers, even though it’s easy for them to see how many people are clicking on their homes. “You can set up a Web site, the seller can have a password, go online,” Mr. Steinberg said. But “they want to see that you’re dragging people to their properties.”
All of which suggests that open houses are simply a holdover from the era when people grabbed the Sunday classifieds, a strong cup of coffee and their running shoes to schlep from borough to borough in search of their dream home.
Except when the system works. Take that $1.68 million house in Park Slope, a three-story charmer with a small roof deck, a front porch and a basement made for hobbits. It was sold just days after I saw it as a result of, you guessed it, an open house.
To be sure, for every broker who doubts the process, there’s another who hails it, saying the open house is a good way for buyers to educate themselves, a good way for brokers to practice their pitches and an even better way to get those two groups together in the same space at the same time.
“I think it’s one of the greatest things going on in real estate,” said Judi Lederer, a senior vice president of Town Residential. “I really do.” She added that finding time to schedule private viewings can be the most difficult part of being a broker.
So is the open house an authentic rite of passage to the front gate of homeownership? Or is it time-wasting window shopping? Are passers-through just daydreaming, or taking the first step in making that dream real?
To try to find out, I embarked on a tour of open houses over several weekends, entertaining flights of fancy in fine digs around the city, a voyeuristic jaunt that was part keeping up with the Joneses, part “Talented Mr. Ripley.” Along the way, I imagined living in elegant brownstones in Brooklyn, along cobblestone streets in TriBeCa and in 1-Percenter pads in Clinton. I’ve seen myself as a D.I.Y.-er in Hamilton Heights, a gentrifier in Harlem and a penthouser in Park Slope.
And what I discovered was the variety of strategies and techniques employed in the open-house game, which often combines the tactics of chess with the funny money of Monopoly.
First off there’s the question of timing. During the summer, for instance, weekend open houses dry up in Manhattan as vacation homes beckon. But they seem to flourish in places like Park Slope, where new families and their strollers are ubiquitous. Having someone to cart you around could be an advantage, as brokers tend to hew to strict time periods, usually 5 to 7 p.m. on weekdays and 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Sundays. (Fridays and Saturdays are a wasteland, for the most part.)
While weekends may be for happy amateurs, weekdays are for professionals.
“Nobody is coming after work when they’re exhausted unless they’re serious about buying,” said Elaine Clayman, a managing director of Brown Harris Stevens. “On the weekends they may come because they saw a movie in the neighborhood. It’s a Sunday sport.”
Like a lot of sports, this one can be a workout. During one Sunday session in Brooklyn, I managed to hit 11 open houses in a 7-hour period, spending millions of imaginary dollars and burning hundreds of real calories.
Barbara Corcoran, the founder of the Corcoran Group and a grande dame of New York real estate, says creating a commotion of potential customers is an effective strategy.
“Nothing turns a buyer on more than another buyer looking very serious about buying the apartment they like,” she said.
Sure enough, my interaction with fellow shoppers was like meeting other parents at a preschool interview: polite, but undeniably competitive. Sometimes not even polite: On one sweltering day in early July, I raced another potential buyer — a speedy young woman — up four flights in a steamy stairwell to look at some underpriced co-ops near West 140th Street. When I reached the top floor in a lather, the broker asked if we were a couple.
My fellow jogger bristled. “I’m not with him,” she said before disappearing into one of the units.
Well la-di-da. Once you’re on the open-house circuit, you notice the packs of people and their types: the talkers, for instance, who like to try to charm the broker; the investigators, who bring calculators, tape measures and questions about load-bearing walls; the young couples who hold hands and newborns and do mental math about mortgages; and the lurkers, people like me, who hang back, watch the competition and inspect the closets. (More on this later.)
While I looked at apartments ranging from the low six figures to the snazzy sevens, I was never greeted with plates of cheese or flutes of Champagne (though tap water was usually available). The no-frills approach may have something to do with the value of properties on the open-house market: many brokers say that the price threshold for such events tops out around $2 million. Anything listed for more than that is usually viewable only by appointment, with serious buyers flanked by brokers. Higher-end buildings don’t like strangers tramping through their sanctuaries.
Brenda Powers, who specializes in high-end properties for Sotheby’s International Realty, says she doesn’t even like the phrase “open house.”
“I call it a reception,” she said.
More expensive apartments often have more to tempt the less scrupulous among us, said Ms. Kleier of Gumley Haft Kleier.
“You don’t know who is coming into your apartment,” she said. “Someone could slip into another room and open a drawer, and take something out.”
Or at least snoop.
“Everyone wants to look in the closets,” said Ms. Lederer of Town Residential.
Sometimes at one’s own risk. At an apartment in Chelsea, I opened a closet to discover the seller had a penchant for Star Wars bobbleheads. In Park Slope, I wandered into a back room and encountered a mannequin covered in political stickers, including one affixed to a particularly delicate area of the anatomy. I left quickly.
Other units leave less to the imagination. Some brokers outfit apartments with a variety of staples perceived to be inviting — candles, fake flowers, never-read books — and the go-to decorative flourish: a black and white photo, leaning against a wall, of a lonely tree. (Nothing is mounted, since no one wants to buy a place with holes in the wall.)
In several apartments, brokers had even set the table for dinner — plates, glasses, napkins. Which looks nice, but also gives the strange sensation of a family that has just … disappeared.
Likewise, all the nice prep work inside the apartment doesn’t prevent a bad impression from being made by other tenants of the building. At an apartment I saw in Brooklyn, the downstairs neighbor had a doormat that read “Come Back With a Warrant.” I didn’t.
Some brokerages pack several open houses into a single neighborhood to create the “caravan effect,” with hordes of home- and/or entertainment-seekers roaming from address to address.
Nowhere is there more caravan action than in Park Slope, where dozens of properties are commonly shown on any given Sunday, and where I encountered Jeff Goldman, a clinical psychologist who had been house-hunting and open-housing for — prepare yourself — three years. He called the process “incredibly frustrating,” but said that he had to keep looking: he and his wife and their toddler weren’t really fitting into their one-bedroom anymore.
“It can be a big waste of time,” Dr. Goldman said, in large part because online listings can be squishy: two-bedroom apartments billed as three-bedrooms, closets touted as dens and fire escapes advertised as decks. Yet that day, he and his family saw something they liked, and ever hopeful, put in a bid.
Which, of course, is part of the reason open houses have survived. A home, after all, is one of the most expensive purchases in life, so it’s best to see it up close and personal. Not that you will be alone in your search. On a recent Sunday, I ran into Jessica Kleiman twice on the open-house trail.
Ms. Kleiman, a vice president for public relations of Hearst Magazines, was hunting with her 2-year-old daughter, pushing a stroller on a balmy afternoon. She’d hit three listings that afternoon, all walk-ups, all disappointing, she said.
As a no-nonsense New Yorker, Ms. Kleiman said she knew the search could be long but was determined to find a home. As she prepared for another climb up the stairs, she delivered a universal, Zen-like truth about open houses.
“This would be a lot more fun,” she said, “if I didn’t actually need a place to live.”