Broker Open House: What It Is and How to Run One

A broker open house is a preview of a listing for other licensed agents. No public traffic, no buyers touring with a stroller. You invite the agents who work that neighborhood and that price band, feed them, and ask what they would price the home at.

Most write-ups about them stop at the catering. The part that can cost you money is whether your MLS lets you hold the event on the date you want. Rules differ by MLS and by association, and none of this is legal advice. Confirm with your broker.

What a broker open house is

An agent-only showing, usually midweek in a late-morning window of about two hours, hosted by the listing agent. Food is standard because food is the reason a working agent stops. What the sandwiches buy you:

• A pricing read. Agents who tour homes weekly will tell you where the market puts this one, faster than a week of silence will.
• Buyer matches. The agent standing in your kitchen may already have a client in that price band.
• Condition feedback while it is still cheap to fix. A Wednesday room of licensees says out loud what a hundred Sunday visitors think and never mention.
• Awareness among the people most likely to write the offer.

Broker open house vs public open house

Our guide to the best time and day for an open house covers the weekday, twilight and weekend windows for the public version. The row that decides your compliance question is the last one: how you advertise the event, not who attends it.

Broker open vs broker tour: two different events

A broker tour, also called a caravan, usually belongs to your local REALTOR association. You submit the listing by a deadline, the association publishes a tour sheet, and agents follow the route as a group. A broker open house belongs to you and happens at your listing. The tour half runs on published procedure:

• Submission deadlines. SILVAR closes district by district: Menlo Park and Atherton at noon Monday for a Tuesday tour, Palo Alto at noon Thursday for a Friday tour. SFAR takes San Francisco listings until noon Monday for tours Tuesday and Wednesday. SLOCAOR requires the property added to the Caravan Tour in CRMLS "by 4:15 pm the day prior."
• Day and district blocks. SLOCAOR tours San Luis Obispo City every Wednesday 9:30 to 11:30 am, and Cambria, Cayucos, Morro Bay and Los Osos Thursday in the same window. The district picks the hour, not you.
• A presence requirement. SILVAR: "If the property is occupied, staged or furnished, the Agent/Broker or designated representative must be present for the entire Scheduled Tour."
• Re-tour limits, where they exist. SILVAR permits a retour "beginning the fourth week from that property's most recent tour date," with an exception for a price change of at least 5% or a status change. SLOCAOR says the opposite: "There are no restrictions to the number of times a property may be placed on Tour."

Most listing agents hold the broker open on tour day, inside the tour window, so the caravan supplies the attendance they would otherwise spend a week chasing.

When you can hold it: the MLS rules that decide your date

Here is where the common advice goes wrong. Redfin's explainer tells sellers that "agents typically schedule a broker's open house before it goes live on the multiple listing service (MLS) or in the first few days afterward." In a market with a Coming Soon status, doing that can disqualify the listing.

Canopy MLS, which serves the Charlotte region, put it in writing on April 24, 2026: "Any showing of a property in CSNS status disqualifies the property from that status, and the listing agent is cited for a Category IV violation." The fines escalate: "first violation = $1,000, second violation = $3,000, third violation = expulsion from Canopy MLS."

The same article bans caravans in that status, quoting NAR General Counsel Katie Johnson: a Coming Soon listing available for showing only through the listing firm "can result in participants circumventing the duty to cooperate." On the event itself it wastes no words. "No open houses," it says, before closing the loophole most agents reach for: "If a property is ready for an open house, it should be ready for showings."

Pre-active status changed again in 2025. NAR's Multiple Listing Options for Sellers policy took effect March 25, 2025, with MLSs required to adopt it by September 30, 2025, and added Delayed Marketing Exempt Listings: the seller signs a certification, the listing is filed with the MLS and stays visible to other participants, and public IDX and syndication wait a period each MLS sets locally. That policy never mentions open houses or broker opens, so a delayed-marketing window tells you nothing about whether you may hold one. Your MLS's own rule decides.

Does a broker open count as public marketing under Clear Cooperation?

There is no national answer, and any page that hands you one is guessing. Each MLS writes its own definition of public marketing, and the definitions disagree on this exact point.

• NAR Policy Statement 8.00 requires that "within one (1) business day of marketing a property to the public, the listing broker must submit" the listing to the MLS. Its list covers window flyers, yard signs, digital marketing on public-facing websites, brokerage website displays including IDX and VOW, email blasts, multi-brokerage listing sharing networks, and applications available to the general public. Open houses, broker opens and tours appear nowhere in it. Read it in NAR's handbook.
• CRMLS adds them. Its definition ends with the words "or on any applications available to the public, or by conducting an open house."
• Stellar MLS lists window flyers, yard signs, multi-brokerage listing sharing websites, brokerage website displays including IDX and VOW, digital marketing on public websites, and digital communications including emails. Open houses are not on the list.

One national policy, three readings, all checked September 3, 2026. One thing holds whichever list governs you: the promotion around the event is named in every version. A yard sign is public marketing under NAR, CRMLS and Stellar alike, and a public social post is digital marketing on a public-facing site. You can run an agent-only event and still have marketed the property publicly, because of the sign you staked in the yard so agents could find the door.

What to check in your own MLS and association rulebook

Twenty minutes, once, and you stop guessing. Open your MLS rules document and your association's tour page, and write down five answers with the date you checked them.

1. Does your MLS's public-marketing definition contain the words "open house"? Search for that exact phrase.
2. Does your MLS have a Coming Soon or delayed-marketing status, and does it prohibit showings during it? Search for "showing" inside that section.
3. If it does, what is the violation category and the penalty schedule?
4. Does your association run a scheduled tour, and what are the submission deadline and day block for your district?
5. Are there re-tour limits, and what resets them: a stated percentage price change, a status change, nothing at all?

Keep the answers and the source URLs in one note. When a seller asks Tuesday whether you can do a broker open Thursday, you answer from the rulebook instead of from memory.

Running a broker open that agents actually attend

• Schedule inside the caravan window. Hitting the association's submission deadline is most of the attendance battle, and it costs nothing.
• Invite by name. Pull agents with recent sales in that neighborhood and price band out of the MLS, then email them one at a time. A few dozen personal notes beat a blast to the whole board.
• Feed people something they can eat standing up. The caravan is on a clock.
• Hand out one page. Price, taxes, HOA dues, what was updated and when, showing instructions. Agents remember homes by that sheet.
• Staff the door yourself. California's DRE update on open house broker sittings, June 12, 2025, grants that the Real Estate Law does not explicitly prohibit a broker unaffiliated with the seller's broker from sitting an open house, then says plainly: "DRE cautions against this practice." One of the questions it raises: "Will the other broker's agency relationship with the seller be disclosed and consented to by the seller?" Our guide to hosting an open house for another agent covers it from the covering agent's side.

What to capture when an agent signs in

You are logging licensed peers here, so the record looks nothing like a Sunday one and the follow-up goes to agents rather than buyers. Five fields carry the event: first and last name, brokerage, license number or MLS ID, mobile and email, and whether they have a buyer in this price band right now.

The license or MLS ID is the field everyone skips and later wishes they had. It confirms that the person who wrote the feedback is a licensee. It also sorts out the two attendees named Jen, and it ties one of them to whoever turns up three weeks later with an offer.

Full disclosure, because this is our site: we make OpenHouse, an iPhone and iPad sign-in app, so read this paragraph as a vendor talking about its own product. What matters for a broker open is that you set the sign-in questions yourself, so the same screen that asks a Sunday visitor about their timeline can ask an agent for brokerage and license ID. OpenHouse writes each sign-in to the device with no network call at capture time, which is what you want in a basement listing with one bar of signal, and exports the list as CSV. A paper clipboard also works. Remembering does not.

The broker open house feedback form

A broker open feedback form is a different instrument from the one you hand buyers. The buyer version asks about impressions, condition and competing homes, and our open house feedback form templates cover that. The broker version asks a licensed peer for a professional opinion, and it has to be short enough to finish standing up. Five questions, in this order:

1. What would you list this at today? A number, not a range. Ranges are how agents dodge the question.
2. At the current price, how long does it sit? Answer in weeks. This is the question that moves sellers.
3. What is the one thing that would stop your buyer? Singular, on purpose.
4. Do you have a buyer for this in the next 60 days?
5. What would you change about the photos, the description or the showing hours?

Ask them on the sign-in screen while the agent is already holding the device. A clipboard by the door collects almost nothing at a broker open, because the caravan is already walking to the next house.

Turning agent feedback into the seller conversation

Report the distribution, not the average. A debrief that sounds like this gets a decision out of a seller: "Nine agents toured. Seven priced it between $615,000 and $640,000. Two said $665,000. Six named the kitchen counters unprompted." A seller who hears "feedback was mostly positive" shrugs and waits another two weeks. What keeps the debrief useful:

• Separate price from condition. Different decisions, different price tags. Blending them lets a seller fix the cheap thing and ignore the expensive one.
• Count the repeats. One agent's opinion about the paint is taste. Six agents naming the same room is evidence.
• Attribute nothing by name. Agents give you a real number because the room is professional and private.

OpenHouse builds a seller report from the sign-in data before you lock up, and the discipline is the same whether you use our app, a spreadsheet or a legal pad.

The broker open house numbers nobody publishes

Most statistics you will read about broker opens are unsourced. Here is what we went looking for on September 3, 2026 and could not find:

• The share of US listings that hold one. NAR's Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers and the REALTORS Confidence Index do not break it out. Our own 49-city open house study counts scheduled opens with no broker-versus-public flag, and Monday through Wednesday accounted for 0.4% of them. Broker opens rarely reach consumer portals at all, which is much of why nobody can count them.
• Average attendance. We found no association, MLS or NAR report that publishes an agent headcount. The "expect 10 to 15 agents" line in circulation traces back to no published source we could locate.
• The share of homes sold to a buyer whose agent attended. The figure of roughly 5% turns up in aggregator posts. We could not find an original study behind it.
• Whether a broker open shortens days on market or lifts the price. We found no controlled study, and no MLS publishes a broker-open flag joined to outcome data.
• Typical spend on catering and prizes. No agent marketing-spend survey we checked isolates that line item.
• How many associations still run a weekly tour. SILVAR, SLOCAOR and SFAR publish their own schedules. Nobody aggregates them.
• How often broker opens breach Coming Soon or Clear Cooperation rules. MLSs publish fine schedules, not violation counts by type.

Measure your own instead. Two numbers come free off the sign-in list: how many agents signed in, and how many said yes to the buyer question. After five listings you have a baseline for your market and price band that no aggregator can sell you. The follow-up mechanics live in our open house lead capture playbook.

Frequently asked questions

What is a broker open house?

An agent-only preview of a listing, hosted by the listing agent, usually midweek in a late-morning window of about two hours and often timed to the local broker caravan. Attendees are licensed agents rather than public buyers. The purpose is a pricing opinion and condition feedback from people who tour homes weekly, plus exposure to the agents most likely to bring an offer.

Is a broker open house the same as a broker tour?

No. A broker tour, also called a caravan, is usually run by a local REALTOR association on a fixed schedule with a submission deadline and district day blocks. A broker open house is your own event at your own listing. Many listing agents hold the broker open inside the tour window so the caravan supplies the attendance.

Can you hold a broker open house before the listing goes active?

It depends on your MLS. Canopy MLS states that any showing of a property in Coming Soon (CSNS) status disqualifies the property from that status and cites the listing agent for a Category IV violation, with fines starting at $1,000. Check your own MLS rules for a Coming Soon or delayed-marketing status before you schedule, and confirm with your broker.

Does a broker open house trigger Clear Cooperation?

There is no national answer, because each MLS writes its own definition of public marketing. NAR Policy Statement 8.00 does not name open houses. CRMLS includes the words "by conducting an open house" in its definition. Stellar MLS's published list does not name them. Search your own MLS's definition for the phrase "open house" and follow what it says.

What should a broker open house feedback form ask?

Five questions a licensed peer can answer standing up: what would you list this at today, how long does it sit at the current price, what one thing would stop your buyer, do you have a buyer for this in the next 60 days, and what would you change about the photos, description or showing hours. Ask for a single number on price rather than a range.

How many agents come to a broker open house?

We could not find an association, MLS or NAR report that publishes attendance figures for broker open houses, so treat any national average you see as unsourced. Track your own instead: count sign-ins across five listings and you have a baseline for your market and price band.