Twenty to three on a Saturday, the fourth group through the door is a couple in gardening clothes, and before you can say hello the woman says, “We’re just the neighbors, we live four down, we won’t be long.” She has come to see what the kitchen looks like now. He has come because she did. They will spend nine minutes in the house, most of it in the kitchen, and on the way out she will say the thing neighbors say at open houses when nobody is listening properly: “We’ve been thinking about what we’d do with ours.”<\/p>\n
Most agents lose that sentence. They are watching the door for the couple with the pre-approval letter, the neighbors have already announced they are not buying, and the sign-in sheet on the counter has a name on it with no phone number and the word “neighbor” written in the comments column as if it were a disqualification. By Tuesday the couple four doors down is a memory and the agent is back on the phone calling the same street with a script that starts from nothing, when a conversation had already been started in person, on the seller’s doorstep, on a Saturday.<\/p>\n
Any agent who has held an open house on a residential street knows the mix. Buyers who saw the listing. Buyers who were driving past. People who are a year from buying and want to calibrate. And neighbors, always neighbors, because a house they have walked past for a decade is open and the price is on the internet and they want to know what that means for theirs. The just-listed call<\/a> asked them to come. Some of them did. The circle hub<\/a> builds every call on a market event, and an open house is the one event where the neighbors come to you.<\/p>\n The neighbor at the door is not a distraction from the seller-side work of the afternoon. They are the seller-side work of the afternoon. The buyers belong to whoever is buying; the neighbors belong to the street, which is the thing you are trying to earn.<\/p>\n The greeting is the same for everyone. What changes, once someone says they live on the street, is what you ask.<\/p>\n Then you know this house better than I do. Have a look around, and on the way out I’d like two minutes of your opinion, because you’re the one who knows what it’s like to live here.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n That is the whole opening. It gives them permission to be nosy, which is why they came, and it books two minutes on the way out without asking for anything. On the way out you ask two questions, and the questions piece<\/a> has the longer version of both. The first is about the house: what would a buyer want to know about the street that the listing cannot tell them? The second is about the price, asked as feedback, because a neighbor’s reaction to the number is information about the street’s own view of itself.<\/p>\n What you do not ask is what their plans are. If they volunteer it, and the couple four doors down just did, you take it, as the sentence it was: “Would it help if I put together what yours would likely bring, no obligation, and dropped it in your mailbox this week?” If they do not volunteer it, the question waits for the Monday call, where it belongs, because a neighbor who feels interviewed at a neighbor’s open house tells the street.<\/p>\n One line about the seller. A neighbor will ask why they are selling, where they are going, whether they have had offers. The seller’s reasons and the seller’s negotiating position are the seller’s, and the Code of Ethics<\/a> at Standard of Practice 1-9 keeps them that way. “They’re ready for their next place, and I’ll let them tell that story” closes it kindly. The list price is public. The rest is not.<\/p>\n The sheet on the counter is a compliance object, and most agents treat it as a formality. Two things about it matter.<\/p>\n The first is that a neighbor who writes a phone number on a sheet that says nothing about calls has given you a number and not much else. The do-not-call rules<\/a> allow a call to a registered number under an established business relationship, and the FCC’s definition at 47 CFR 64.1200(f)(5)<\/a> includes a person’s inquiry about your services within the three months before the call, formed by voluntary two-way communication. A visitor who asked at the door what their house would bring, and wrote their number down so you could tell them, has made an inquiry. A visitor who wrote their name because the clipboard was in front of them has not clearly done anything, and an agent who dials that number on Monday is relying on a reading of the rule that a complaint would test.<\/p>\n So the sheet asks. A line under the phone number: “Would you like a call about what your home might be worth? Yes \/ No.” A neighbor who ticks yes has answered the question the rule cares about, in their own hand, dated, and the three-month clock starts on Saturday. A neighbor who ticks no has told you something too, and the record holds it. If you want to text rather than call, the sheet needs the consent language the texting rules<\/a> piece describes, because a phone number on a sign-in is not consent to a text.<\/p>\n The second thing is that the sheet holds individual answers rather than a list. Each row goes into the system as its own record, with what the person said, on the day, before the details blur into “the neighbors seemed interested.”<\/p>\nThe ten minutes at the door<\/h2>\n
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What the sign-in sheet is worth<\/h2>\n