An open house announcement is four pieces of copy sitting in four different fields, and the rules change as you move between them. MLS public remarks describe the property and nothing else. The date and time belong in the MLS open house event fields. A social caption wants the address, the time, your brokerage name and a link. Email, text and print take all of it at once.
Most example sets online are written as if those four were one field. Paste "OPEN HOUSE SAT 1-3, call me at 555-0134" into MLS public remarks and, in a lot of markets, you have just broken two rules at once. One of them carries a per-day fine.
Two disclosures before you start. OpenHouse is our own iPad sign-in app, and it gets one section near the end, where it changes a single line of the copy. None of this is legal advice either: your MLS rulebook, your state commission and your broker's policy decide what you are actually allowed to publish.
Where each piece of open house copy actually goes
| Field | What belongs in it | The rule behind it |
|---|---|---|
| MLS public remarks | The physical property and its vicinity | Open house info, contact info and compensation are barred in the rulebooks cited below |
| MLS open house event fields | Date, start time, end time, public or broker-only | This is the field the portals read to publish an open house event |
| Social caption | Address, time, one detail, brokerage name, link | NAR Standard of Practice 12-5; state advertising rules such as TREC 535.155 |
| Email and text | Everything above, plus the link and a QR code | Same brokerage identification, plus whatever consent your list was built on |
| Door hanger, flyer, sign rider | Address, time, brokerage, QR code | Printed pieces are advertising and carry the same identification rules |
Everything on this page is written before the event. What you say out loud at the door is a different job, covered in our open house scripts. When to publish each piece, and which channels to run at all, is the media plan, covered in how to promote an open house.
MLS public remarks: the rules that decide your wording
NorthstarMLS states it plainly: "Open House information is restricted to the designated open house fields." Pacific Southwest Association of REALTORS, summarizing CRMLS rule 12.5, publishes eleven things to keep out of public remarks, and the list includes open house information alongside phone numbers, email addresses, website addresses and agent or brokerage identification.
That is not a soft style note. The Oklahoma City Metropolitan Association of REALTORS publishes an actual fine ladder for public remarks violations: $25 per day until corrected on a first offense, $50 plus $25 per day on a second, $100 plus $25 per day plus a board referral on a third, with listing removal and suspension after five business days. The open house line those example sets lead with is the line OKCMAR attached a daily price to.
One more prohibition arrived recently. Since the NAR practice changes took effect on August 17, 2024, offers of compensation cannot be communicated through the MLS, which NAR's settlement FAQs set out. MLSs implemented it by deleting the compensation fields outright, and Bright MLS published subscriber guidance when it made that change. A remarks box is still part of the MLS, so free text is not a workaround. Any inherited template carrying "2.5% to buyer's agent" is a violation now, not a habit. The rest of that shift is in what the NAR settlement changed for open houses.
Strip all of that out and one instruction is left: describe the property and its vicinity. That is also the fair housing instruction, which is convenient, because it means you only have to hold one rule in your head.
Copy-paste MLS remarks, and where the open house time actually goes
Three examples. Read what is missing from them as carefully as what is in them: no open house line, no phone number, no website, no compensation, and no sentence about the kind of person who should live there.
Entry-level single family:
Three bedrooms and two full baths on a level 0.19-acre lot, with a bedroom and full bath on the main floor. The kitchen was rebuilt in 2021 with quartz counters, a gas range and a walk-in pantry. Hardwood runs through the living and dining rooms. Fenced back yard, detached two-car garage, covered east-facing porch. Roof replaced 2019, furnace serviced March 2026.
Condo:
Corner unit on the fourth floor with windows on two sides and a 14-foot balcony facing the river. One bedroom, one bath, 812 square feet, washer and dryer in the unit. The building added a keyed elevator and a package room in 2023. HOA dues are $412 per month and cover water, trash and the fitness room. One deeded garage space, number 47. Association documents available on request.
Renovated or higher-end:
Taken to the studs in 2024 and rebuilt with new plumbing, new wiring and a 200-amp panel. The kitchen has a 36-inch dual-fuel range, a pot filler and a butler's pantry with a second sink. Steam shower in the main bath. Screened porch off the back with a wood-burning fireplace and a gas line at the grill. 0.4 acres, irrigated, with a 24-by-30 outbuilding wired for a shop.
Name features you actually have. Zillow's April 4, 2018 analysis of roughly 3.6 million homes sold between January 2016 and December 2017 found that listings mentioning a steam shower sold for about 29% more than expected, with professional appliances at 29% and a pizza oven at 26%. That is a correlation between homes that have those features and their sale prices, not evidence that typing the words does anything. It is a reason to inventory the house before you write, not a keyword list.
Your date and time go in the MLS open house event fields. Those fields are what syndicate to the portals as an open house event and what trigger saved-search alerts, so an open house typed into the remarks reaches nobody's search while breaking a rule. Fill in start, end and whether it is public or broker-only. If your MLS gives you an open house comments field, "street parking on the north side only" belongs there.
Copy-paste social captions for Facebook, Instagram and Nextdoor
The address, the time and the link are all allowed here. That is the trade: what the remarks field turns away, the caption picks up.
Facebook:
Open house Saturday, March 14, 11am to 1pm. 412 Maple Lane, Fairview. Three bedrooms, a main-floor bedroom and bath, and a kitchen rebuilt in 2021. Street parking on the north side. Sign-in is on an iPad at the door and takes under a minute. Come with questions about the roof, the furnace or the trail access.
[Your name], [License #], [Brokerage name]
Instagram:
Rebuilt kitchen. Main-floor bedroom and bath. East-facing porch. 412 Maple Lane, Fairview, open Saturday 11 to 1. Park on the north side. Full details at the link in bio.
[Your name], [Brokerage name]
Nextdoor:
Neighbors, I am holding 412 Maple open this Saturday from 11 to 1. If you know someone who has been trying to get onto this street, send them over. If you just want to see what the inside looks like, that is welcome too. Please park on the north side so the driveway stays clear.
[Your name], [Brokerage name]
A QR code in the image, rather than a link in the caption, survives platforms that bury outbound links. Our guide to QR codes for real estate covers where to point one so it still works after the listing closes.
The brokerage line most open house captions leave out
Caption libraries hand you the address, the time and an emoji, then stop. The line they leave out is the one the advertising rules actually require.
NAR Standard of Practice 12-5 requires a REALTOR to disclose the name of their firm in a reasonable and readily apparent manner when advertising, in any medium, either in the ad itself or, in electronic advertising, through a link to a display carrying the required disclosures. State rules go further. The Texas Real Estate Commission's guidance on rule 535.155 defines an advertisement to include social media and text messages, and requires the name of the license holder or team placing the ad plus the broker's name in at least half the size of the largest contact information shown for any sales agent, associated broker or team. TREC lets that required detail live on a directly linked profile page instead of in every post, which is why a complete Instagram bio does real work for you.
Texas is one state's version. Find your own commission's advertising rule before you settle on a caption template you will reuse fifty times.
Fair housing wording: the famous banned-words list is not HUD's
The forbidden-words list circulating in real estate training decks is not a HUD document, and has not been one since the Clinton administration. HUD removed 24 CFR Part 109, its Fair Housing Advertising regulation, in a final rule published April 1, 1996 and effective May 1, 1996 (61 FR 14378 to 14380, docket FR-4029-F-01).
What binds instead is 24 CFR 100.75, which prohibits any notice, statement or advertisement indicating a preference, limitation or discrimination based on protected characteristics. It names categories of conduct, not vocabulary. That is harder to memorize and easier to apply, because it collapses into one test: describe the property, not the buyer.
- "Perfect for a growing family" describes the buyer. "Four bedrooms and a fenced yard" describes the property.
- "Walkable to St. Anne's" points at a religion. Give the distance instead: "0.3 miles to the Route 9 bus stop."
- "Great starter home for a young couple" is about who lives there. "1,180 square feet, one level, no steps at the entry" is about the house.
The same test applies to your caption, your door hanger and your email subject line, not only the MLS field.
If you boost the post: what the Meta settlement changed
The standard advice, ours included, is to boost a post to a three to five mile radius around the listing. HUD's April 29, 2024 guidance on advertising through digital platforms names "precise geographic location (e.g., census blocks)" as one of the proxies that can stand in for a protected characteristic, and it puts responsibility on the entities and individuals placing advertisements, not only on the platform. A five mile radius is not a census block, and HUD's example describes tools that cut far tighter than that. The lesson is that geography can carry a protected characteristic, which makes the radius a judgment call instead of a default.
Housing ads on Meta run inside a restricted Special Ad Category, and the Justice Department's 2022 case, filed June 21, 2022 and settled the same month, narrowed it again. Meta stopped using its Special Ad Audience tool for housing ads and agreed to offer no targeting options that directly describe or relate to characteristics protected by the Fair Housing Act. That menu has changed more than once since.
Read Meta's current housing ads help page before you assume any given radius is available to you. We will not quote a radius figure here that we cannot verify first-party. Whether to boost at all belongs to the media plan, not to the copy.
Copy-paste email, text and printed announcements
Email to your own list. Subject: 412 Maple is open Saturday, 11 to 1
Hi [first name],
I am holding 412 Maple Lane in Fairview open this Saturday from 11 to 1. Three bedrooms, a main-floor bedroom and full bath, kitchen rebuilt in 2021, fenced yard, detached garage.
Parking is on the north side of the street. Sign-in is on an iPad by the front door and takes under a minute, so nobody waits in a line at the entry.
Photos and the full listing: [link]
[Your name], [License #], [Brokerage name], [phone]
Text message. Send this only to people who agreed to be texted, on the terms they agreed to. Your broker's policy and the FCC's rules govern that, not a template.
[First name], it is [your name] with [brokerage]. 412 Maple is open Saturday 11 to 1 if you want to see it before offers come in. Park on the north side. Reply STOP to opt out.
Door hanger or neighbor invite.
Your neighbor at 412 Maple is selling. Open house Saturday, March 14, 11am to 1pm. Come see the inside, and tell anyone you know who has been trying to get onto this street.
[Your name], [Brokerage name], [phone]
Sign rider. A rider is read at 30 miles an hour, so it carries the day and the window and nothing else. "OPEN SAT 11-1" is the whole thing. Your brokerage name lives on the main panel above it.
One line worth adding: tell people how sign-in works
One sentence about sign-in belongs in every announcement that allows a URL: "Sign-in is on an iPad at the door and takes under a minute."
Visitors fake a phone number when signing in feels like opting into a marketing campaign they never asked for, which is the argument in why open house visitors give fake info. Naming the step in the announcement makes it something they agreed to before they parked. Nobody has measured whether that lifts data quality, ourselves included, so treat it as reasoning and not as a proven tactic.
OpenHouse is our own product, so read the recommendation as an interested party. It holds whether you run an iPad, a tablet from another vendor or a clipboard: say what the step is before people arrive. The line cannot go in the MLS remarks, which is exactly why the social, email and print blocks are where it earns its place.
What no one publishes about open house wording
Every claim below is a documented absence, checked September 3, 2026. If a competing page gives you a number for one of these, ask where it came from.
- No public dataset connects open house announcement wording to how many people walk through the door.
- No published benchmark exists for social-post-to-attendee conversion. Platform stats count impressions, likes and clicks, never doorsteps.
- No credible study measures listing description length against showings, offers or attendance. MLS character limits run from a few hundred to roughly 1,500 characters and are a field constraint, not a performance finding.
- No MLS publishes its rate of public remarks violations. Rules and fine schedules are public; enforcement counts are not. Slide decks circulate with $500, $750 and $1,000 fine figures that trace back to no published rulebook we could find, so treat them as unverified.
- No HUD list of banned fair housing words has existed since May 1, 1996.
- NAR's Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers does not break out how many buyers read a listing description before attending an open house.
- No emoji, hashtag or call-to-action performance data exists for real estate open house posts. Cross-industry engagement studies are not the same thing.
Before you blame the wording
When nobody comes, the caption is rarely the reason. Check the runway, the directional signs and whether the open house event actually syndicated, in that order: no one came to my open house walks through the diagnosis, and the channel plan for promoting a listing covers what to run and when. Rewrite the copy after you have ruled those out, not before.
Frequently asked questions
What should an open house description say?
Describe the physical property and its vicinity: room counts, what was replaced and when, lot size, HOA dues, parking. Leave the date and time out of the listing remarks and put them in your MLS open house event fields instead, and leave phone numbers, email addresses and website addresses out of the remarks as well.
Can you put open house information in MLS public remarks?
Usually no. NorthstarMLS states that open house information is restricted to the designated open house fields, and Pacific Southwest Association of REALTORS lists open house information among the categories to keep out of public remarks when summarizing CRMLS rule 12.5. Rules are set by each MLS, so check your own rulebook before you publish.
What is good open house announcement wording for social media?
Address, day and date, start and end time, one specific detail about the house, your brokerage name, and a link. NAR Standard of Practice 12-5 requires a REALTOR to disclose the name of their firm in a reasonable and readily apparent manner, in any advertising medium, and in electronic advertising that disclosure may sit behind a link to a display carrying the required disclosures. State advertising rules apply on top of it, so check your own commission's.
Is there an official list of fair housing words you cannot use in a listing?
No. HUD removed 24 CFR Part 109, its Fair Housing Advertising regulation, by a final rule published April 1, 1996 and effective May 1, 1996. What still binds is 24 CFR 100.75, which prohibits any statement that indicates a preference, limitation or discrimination based on protected characteristics, and which names categories rather than specific words.
Can you mention commission or compensation in a listing description?
No. Under the NAR practice changes that took effect August 17, 2024, offers of compensation cannot be communicated through the MLS, and MLSs removed their compensation fields to comply. A public remarks box is still part of the MLS, so free text is not a workaround. Older listing description templates still carry co-op language, so check anything you inherited.
How long should an open house description be?
Long enough to name the physical facts a buyer would ask about, and short enough to fit your MLS field limit, which runs from a few hundred characters to roughly 1,500 depending on the system. No public study measures listing description length against showings, offers or open house attendance, so treat any recommended word count as opinion.