How to Make an Open House Questionnaire for Realtors

Ok we can admit it: learning how to craft the perfect Open House Questionnaire doesn’t sound like stimulating reading…to anyone. Even in the realm of Open House Ideas, it’s not particularly exciting.

But getting a competitive advantage in your market, on the other hand…

Now that sounds like something worth digging into.

That’s what a well designed and executed Open House Questionnaire has the power to do: get a better understanding of your market.

Most successful businesses use similar tactics and they’re called feedback loops and they allow us to improve our products and services based on real market feedback. Does this look familiar?

And as an agent, an Open House survey is a great way to closely interact with your market to get this feedback.

And if you follow our suggestions below, you can improve the size, quality and speed of that market feedback giving you a competitive advantage.

In these sections, we’ll cover our top tips for creating an Open House questionnaire:

• A good Open House generates leads AND market research 
• Open House Sign-in vs Open House questionnaire
• Maximizing Open House questionnaire participation
• Designing a good Open House questionnaire for real estate agents
• “Done for you” Open House questionnaires that you can use right now
• “DIY” browse popular questions to create your own Open House questionnaire

(skip ahead 👆 to any section of interest)

A good Open House generates leads AND market research 

If you’re a real estate agent, then you know that open houses are a great way to generate leads…and ideally generate a buyer for the property you’re hosting the Open House at!

But it’s not all about leads. Sometimes the information you get from these Open House visitors is incredibly useful and to capture that info, you need to have a good Open House questionnaire.

This questionnaire will help you collect information from potential leads like their honest opinion of the property, how it’s priced relative to the market as well as their unique needs and wants as buyers.

Before we get into how to create a great Open House questionnaire, let’s cover specific goals why an agent might create an Open House questionnaire:

1. inform whether to make minor adjustments to the property like staging or painting
2. give you some pricing intel especially if you think a difficult price reduction discussion may need to happen with your sellers
3. gain a more general understanding on buyers in this market
4. if you’re holding a broker’s Open House and the questionnaire is being filled out by agents, you definitely want to get their take on all of the above because they’ll potentially be representing many buyers within this market

Here’s one reason you wouldn’t want to create a questionnaire: capture more intel on the specific Open House visitor that will help you become their buyer’s agent

Shocked? Well here’s why: the Open House questionnaire and the Open House sign-in are different. 

The difference between an Open House Sign-in and an Open House questionnaire

The sign-in is about getting the basic info for everyone at the Open House. You want to do that to maximize the number of leads you capture…and in some cases your seller may require that you to get everyone’s info before they view the property and we have a separate article all about getting the most possible Open House sign-ins.

For starters, we recommend using a digital Open House Sign in sheet like Curb Hero to get the buyer’s info and ask them just a couple basic questions like “Are you working with a real estate agent?”.

With our app agents have proven that they get more sign-ins and the data is more accurate vs a pen & paper sign-in. But one source of contention is that because you want to maximize sign-ins, you’ll also want to restrain yourself when it comes to asking lots of long form questions.

…but that’s where the questionnaire comes in! In a follow up text/email (yes Curb Hero can trigger this), send them an Open House questionnaire which will give you the option to get much more info albeit from a subset of the visitors.

That’s the tradeoff…but below we’ll cover plenty of tactics to get more people to participate.

Maximizing Open House questionnaire participation

You can run a raffle to incentivize visitors to fill out Open House survey too. Here’s a little script that may work:

Hey, this is [your name], thanks for stopping by! Just wanted to ask that you sign in before walking through. The seller’s requiring everyone signs in beforehand, but once you do sign in, you’ll get all the property details with photo gallery and virtual tour, sent to you by text AND we’ll also send a link to questionnaire which asks your opinion on the listing.

And once we receive your completed questionnaire, we’ll enter you in a raffle where you can win a $50 home depot gift card. Really appreciate it and let me know if you have any questions about the place.

Hopefully a couple of these resonate with you because that’ll help steer what kinds of info you’ll ask for from your Open House visitors.

Designing a good Open House questionnaire for real estate agents

First decide the goal for the questionnaire: 

• Do you want market research from more buyers? 
• Do you want to know how this property compares to others?
• Are you trying to convince your seller it’s time to reduce the price? 
• Are you looking specifically for input from other agents?

Pick the questions that you want to ask to accomplish that goal, but keep in mind you don’t have unlimited opportunities to get feedback from Open House visitors so don’t overwhelm them with a lengthy questionnaire (aka “homework”).

“Done for you” Open House questionnaires

Here are some popular Open House Questionnaires that are already in Google Forms so you can start using right away.

• Short and Sweet Questionnaire: minimizing the time your questionnaire takes to fill out, increases the completion rate…so if you’re playing “the numbers game” try this option.
• Questionnaire with Ratings: if you want to get your statistical analysis on, here’s the questionnaire for you.
• Broker Open House Feedback form: these questions are all intended for real estate agents. We also have a dedicated article that goes much deeper into hosting a Broker’s Open.

Here’s how to use these Open House questionnaire templates:

1. Open the questionnaire link above – NOTE: to use Google forms, you’ll need to be logged into your Google Account
2. Select the “Copy” option and you’ll have your own version to edit and share. The copy will be automatically be saved to your Google Drive too.
3. Once you are ready, share your Google Form so Open House visitors can participate in your questionnaire. We recommend adding the form URL in Curb Hero’s follow up texts so Open House visitors can participate after they sign-in using Curb Hero’s digital sign-in TIP: you can shorten the URL so it can be shared more easily.

The best questions for an Open House questionnaire

General Questions for the Open House Questionnaire

Here are some of the basic questions to ask Open House visitors:

• How did you hear about this Open House?
• I am interested in (multiple choice): Single Family Houses · Townhomes · Condos · Multifamily Properties
• Time frame for moving (multiple choice): ASAP · 1-3 months · 4-6 months · 7+ months · Whenever I find “the one” · Other
• What is your budget?
• Are you working exclusively with another real estate broker?

Property Feedback Form Questions

You want these to use a standard scale so you can compare across different categories…and even across different properties.

So ask: For each of the categories below please give a rating on a scale of 1 – 5:

• Exterior
• Interior (Note: you can make this more granular so participants can rate the kitchen, living room, individual bedrooms and/or bathrooms, etc)
• Location
• Price
• Amenities (Note: you can make this more granular so participants can rate individual amenities)
• Floor Plan

You can also get more qualitative feedback with these property feedback questions:

• What do you like MOST about this home?
• What do you like LEAST about this home?

Pricing Feedback

Knowing what people thought of the price, is particularly useful if you think you’ll have to go back to the seller and discuss a price reduction. Here’s a few ways to get that feedback so you can have an objective conversation with your seller:

• What’s your opinion of the price (multiple choice): Over-Priced · About Right · Under-Priced
• What do you think this property will sell for?

Tip: you can make it a contest and give a special prize for whoever comes closest

Here’s what NOT to ask: “what would you pay for this property?”

People who aren’t interested will skew the data with very low prices…and others may think this is actually part of a negotiation and may submit a very low number to improve their bargaining position.

Questions to ask in a Broker Open House Feedback Form

Here are some additional questions to consider when your audience is primarily real estate professionals:

• What single item would you most improve?
• At the current listing price, how long do you think it will take this property to sell?
• In your professional opinion, what would be a fair asking price for this property?
• What (if anything) do you think would keep this home from selling?
• Here are some questions based around the different goals we’ve discussed:

There’s gold in them forms

Here’s how to mine it! Once you have your questionnaire submissions it’s time to analyze the data for patterns. Using Google Forms for your Open House questionnaires is great because the results export automatically to Google Sheets which makes analysis super easy.

Also be sure to follow up with your participants! You should be doing this for all visitors that signed-in but these visitors also took the time to share additional feedback so a quick phone call, text or email goes a long way. Thank them for coming to your Open House and let them know that you’ll be in touch soon.

We hope this article helps you get some golden market intel that gives you a competitive edge!