Now if that headline got your attention let me say I am a fan of the open house / broker's open when done properly. My issue is how a lot of real estate agents go about preparing for an open house. It it is a common belief among sellers and many real estate agents that a open house is really just another way for the agent holding it open to get new buyer prospects or customers more than an opportunity to actually sell the house they are sitting open. It does not have to be this way.

The other day I thought of this analogy while watching an agent scuttle around to find another licensed agent to sit their open house 2 days before it was scheduled. It reminded me of my childhood and starting a lemonade stand.

From an early age my younger brother Brad and I always had a entrepreneurial attitude; we always knew we wanted to work for ourselves. We sold GRIT newspapers in the neighborhood and later decided to write our own "newspaper" and sold it door to door. It was more a newsletter looking back, but we were 10 and 8 years old. We would type it up on a typewriter, pay the 3 cents a page to photocopy it and then hit the streets selling them for 25 cents a copy. We tried the mowing grass thing and pulling weeds from the cracks of sidewalks, but everyone else did that we wanted something with ingenuity. Yes, we would also open numerous lemonade stands, but even we learned at a young age in order to be profitable some preparation was involved.

On a side note Can anyone remember the last time a kid has came to your door trying to sell a product they made on their own? Unfortunately, it is usually from their school forcing encouraging them to sell for some benefit the young salesperson does not even comprehend, or know what the funds are for. Furthermore, definitively nothing for less than a dollar.

But now let's get to why I am comparing a Open House to throwing up a lemonade stand. Brad and I had to learn from our mistakes, we learned we could not talk about putting up our lemonade stand on Friday night and expect to cover all the bases to be profitable on Saturday afternoon. There is more to opening a worthwhile lemonade stand than throwing up a card table and a sign, just like there is more to a successful open house than opening the door and throwing up a couple open house signs.

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