Seven steps stand between a seller deciding to sell and a visitor's name landing in an agent's follow-up list. Four of them happen before the open house sign goes in the yard. The step everyone actually sees, an unlocked front door and two hours on a Sunday, sits in the middle of a chain that runs from a signed listing agreement to a state license.
The whole sequence, start to finish
- The seller signs a listing agreement with a brokerage.
- The brokerage files the listing with the MLS.
- The open house is entered as its own MLS record, with a date, time window, and type.
- Signs go out, and the listing and open house time reach the portals.
- A licensed person opens the door and greets whoever arrives.
- Visitors tour the home, and most are asked to sign in.
- The host reports attendance and feedback to the seller, then follows up.
Steps 1 through 4 usually span a week or more. Steps 5 through 7 fit inside one afternoon and the days right after it. For the one-sentence version of the event itself, there is an open house definition in our glossary.
Step 1: the seller has to authorize it in writing
Nobody can hold an open house at a home they have not been hired to sell. The listing agreement creates the authority, and MLS rules are specific about what that document has to be.
Oklahoma City's MLS prints its version of the rule next to the NAR policy it adopted. MLSOK Rule 3.1.1 says listings entered into the system must be "Exclusive Right to Sell or Lease Listings" or "Exclusive Agency to Sell or Lease Listings" signed by the seller and accepted by the participant, and that the brokerage has to keep a copy of every listing agreement for at least one year after the property sells or leases or the listing expires, whichever comes later. Wording varies by MLS. The shape does not: a signed exclusive listing comes first.
That has consequences at the door. A seller can decline open houses altogether, because holding one is a marketing decision made under the agreement and not an obligation created by it. And whoever books the date is acting for the seller.
Step 2: the open house becomes its own record in the MLS
Almost nobody outside the business sees this part. The event gets a database record of its own, with standardized fields, separate from the listing remarks where you might expect to find it.
RESO, the Real Estate Standards Organization, publishes the data dictionary that MLSs build against. Its OpenHouse resource defines 34 fields, including:
- OpenHouseDate, OpenHouseStartTime, OpenHouseEndTime: the scheduled window.
- OpenHouseType: Public, Broker, Office, Association, or Private.
- OpenHouseStatus: Active, Canceled, or Ended, so a scrapped event is marked rather than deleted.
- OpenHouseAttendedBy: Agent, Seller, or Unattended.
- AppointmentRequiredYN: a flag for events that still need a booking.
- OpenHouseRemarks, and yes, a Refreshments field.
Each MLS decides which fields it turns on, so coverage varies. When the same time and date show up identically on several portals, that is one MLS record read by several feeds. A cancellation works the same way: the host updates that one record's status.
Step 3: the signs go out, and a one-business-day clock starts
The yard sign does more work than it looks like. NAR's Clear Cooperation Policy, adopted in November 2019 and published in the Handbook on Multiple Listing Policy, reads: "Within one (1) business day of marketing a property to the public, the listing broker must submit the listing to the MLS for cooperation with other MLS participants." Yard signs are named in the policy's list of public marketing, alongside window flyers, public-facing websites, IDX and VOW displays, email blasts, and multi-brokerage sharing networks.
Open houses are not named in that list. The policy says "includes, but is not limited to," so an MLS can read an open house as public marketing and enforce it that way. NAR's text does not settle the question, which leaves the answer with your MLS.
NAR has since paired the policy with Multiple Listing Options for Sellers, whose delayed marketing option lets a seller hold a listing back from IDX and syndication for any period the local MLS allows. The listing still gets filed. Only its reach changes. By the time a sign is in the yard, the listing is nearly always in the MLS, with the open house record beside it.
Step 4: who is legally allowed to stand at the door
Greeting visitors is a licensed act in some states, which surprises people who assume it is hospitality work.
Texas is the clearest example. 22 Tex. Admin. Code Section 535.4(c) says a person must be licensed as a broker or sales agent to show a property, and it defines "show" to include "causing or permitting the property to be viewed by a prospective buyer or tenant, unlocking or providing access onto or into a property for a prospective buyer or tenant, and hosting an open house at the property." An unlicensed assistant in Texas cannot run the door. The Texas Real Estate Commission's guidance on unlicensed assistants starts from the same principle: an unlicensed person may not engage in any activity for which a license is required.
Other states word their rules differently, and some say nothing explicit about open houses, so read your own commission's rule text before you hand anyone the door. Where hosting counts as a licensed act, the person who let you in answers to a regulator for what they say about the house.
Step 5: the first 60 seconds, and what the sign-in is for
You walk in. Someone says hello, hands you a flyer or points at a tablet, and asks you to sign in.
You do not need a signed buyer agreement to be standing there. NAR's consumer guide to open houses and written agreements, published with the practice changes that took effect on August 17, 2024, says that if you are simply visiting an open house on your own, you do not need to sign one. Our guide to what the NAR settlement changed for open houses covers the same rule from the hosting agent's side.
The person greeting you works for the seller. NAR's guidance says the host is there at the direction of the listing broker or seller, which is why no agreement with you is required. That shapes what you volunteer. Anything you say about your budget, your timeline, or how much you love the kitchen can reach the seller, and passing it along is part of the job.
Agency paperwork usually does not appear at the door either, and the statutes explain why. California Civil Code Section 2079.14 ties delivery of the agency disclosure form to particular moments: the seller's agent gives it to the seller before entering the listing agreement, and the buyer's agent gives it to the buyer as soon as practicable before the buyer signs a representation agreement or an offer to purchase. Touring a house on a Sunday is neither. Other states set their own timing.
The sign-in itself carries no national mandate. Brokerage and seller policy set it. We cover when a visitor can decline in do you have to sign in at an open house.
Step 6: the two hours in the middle
The host is greeting arrivals, answering questions, banking the reactions worth repeating to the seller, and watching the house, all at the same time. That last job is why a busy open sometimes runs a second agent.
If you already have an agent, say so early and give the host their name. If you do not, you are free to look and free to leave without agreeing to anything.
Day, hour, and length vary a lot by market. In our 49-city open house study, 54.6% of scheduled opens ran on a Saturday and 28.7% on a Sunday.
Step 7: what happens to your name after you leave
The sign-in list becomes a seller report: how many people came, what they said about price and condition, and whether anyone asked for a second showing. That report is often the whole reason the seller agreed to the open house.
It also becomes the follow-up list. Most hosts contact visitors within a day or two, and the sign-in details are what make that possible. Where those details travel next, whether a CRM, an email tool, or a vendor's servers, depends on the app the agent chose. Asking at the door is fair.
Public open house, broker open, and private showing
The RESO type list doubles as the industry's map of how these events differ.
- Public: open to anyone, advertised, no appointment. The event most people mean.
- Broker: for agents rather than buyers, usually midweek, so agents with buyers can preview the home.
- Office and Association: the same idea limited to one brokerage or one board.
- Private: invitation only or targeted, which is where a "by appointment" open house lands. AppointmentRequiredYN exists for that case.
A private showing is a different animal: an appointment for one buyer, arranged through the listing agent or a showing service, producing no OpenHouse record at all. Self-touring has its own slot, since OpenHouseAttendedBy allows the value "Unattended."
What NAR's numbers say about who open houses are really for
The 2025 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers, published November 4, 2025 from 6,103 responses covering transactions between July 2024 and June 2025, carries the exhibit-level figures:
- 48% of buyers used an open house as an information source during their search (Exhibit 3-2).
- 43% rated open houses "very useful," with 50% saying somewhat useful and 7% not useful (Exhibit 3-4).
- 3% said visiting open houses was the first step they took in the buying process, against 46% who started by looking online (Exhibit 3-1).
- 52% found the home they bought on the internet and 27% through an agent (Exhibit 3-6).
- 59% of sellers' agents held an open house, behind the MLS at 85% and a yard sign at 67% (Exhibit 7-8).
Read together, those describe a mid-search tool rather than a starting point. Buyers find the house somewhere else, then use the open house to see it without booking. Whether that is worth an agent's Sunday is a separate argument, made in do open houses actually work.
The open house figures nobody publishes
Plenty of confident percentages circulate about open houses. As of September 3, 2026, the following have no citable source behind them:
- The share of visitors who sign in. No NAR report, MLS, or state association publishes it, and no vendor publishes an auditable methodology.
- The share of homes sold at or because of an open house. NAR's Exhibit 3-6 bundles the category as "yard sign/open house sign," so no NAR figure isolates open houses.
- Average attendance per open house. Attendance is not a field in the RESO OpenHouse resource, so MLSs are not collecting it in a standard way.
- Conversion from a sign-in to a closed transaction. Every figure in circulation traces back to vendor marketing.
- The share of visitors already represented by an agent. Nobody publishes it, and August 2024 made the question more consequential rather than better measured.
- The share of visitors who are neighbors rather than buyers. Repeated constantly in trade commentary, never measured in a citable dataset.
- How many open houses are held per year in the US. MLS records exist market by market and are not aggregated nationally.
- The share that run unattended. The RESO value exists. The aggregate does not.
If you are the one hosting
Disclosure: OpenHouse publishes this page and sells an iPhone and iPad sign-in app for agents, so read the sign-in sections with that in mind.
Prep is a timeline problem, broken into a T-7, day-before, and setup-hour sequence in the open house checklist. What happens after is a speed problem: the seller report is due while the impressions are fresh, and so is the first message to each visitor.
None of this is legal advice. Licensing, agency disclosure, and marketing rules come from your state real estate commission, your MLS, and your broker.