Open house sign in questions are a trade you negotiate in public, one stranger at a time. Every question you add tells you a little more about the person standing in the entryway. It also makes it a little more likely that the next visitor types a fake email, leaves half the fields blank, or walks straight past the iPad while their partner is already opening closet doors in the back bedroom. I have watched a lot of agents design an open house questionnaire around the answers they wish they had instead of the form a stranger will finish in thirty seconds. This guide covers the trade honestly: which open house sign in questions earn a required slot, which belong as optional fields, which work better out loud, and where each answer goes once you have it.
Every required question costs you completions
Your form has a budget, and each required field spends some of it. Name and phone are cheap; everyone expects to give those. A required pre-approval disclosure is expensive. A required "what's your current home worth?" is extortionate, and visitors pay you back with made-up answers or no sign-in at all.
You have seen this on paper. A sheet with ten columns gets three of them filled in, in handwriting you cannot read, and the bottom half of the page is blank because people stopped bothering somewhere around visitor twelve. Digital forms hide the problem better. They do not fix it. The longer your list of open house sign in questions, the fewer people finish, and the people you lose are disproportionately the polite, busy, qualified buyers. The neighbor with time to kill will happily fill out anything.
So pick a default for your open house sign in questions and defend it: four required fields, everything else optional or asked out loud. A short form completed by twenty visitors beats a thorough questionnaire completed by nine. The form captures the lead and one sorting signal. The conversation does the rest. Where the form fits in the bigger system (capture, triage, follow-up, seller recap) is covered in the full playbook, and this piece reads better alongside it.
The four fields worth requiring
- Full name. Beyond the obvious, it is what you scan on Monday when you cross-reference visitors against your database.
- Phone number. Your best contact channel. Texts get read; cold emails mostly do not.
- Email address. Your fallback channel, and what most CRMs use to match records.
- Buying timeline. The best sorting question you can put on a form, covered below.
That is the whole required form. Notice what is missing: agent status, pre-approval, price range, current address. Those answers matter, which is why the next two sections take each one on its own terms instead of bolting them on as required fields. Any candidate for your open house sign in questions has to beat one of these four for a required slot, and in fifteen years I have not met one that does. If you want printable and digital templates that use these questions, there is a separate guide with layouts you can copy directly.
"Are you working with an agent?" On the form, or out loud?
This is the most argued-over of all open house sign in questions, and for good reason. It is the most useful answer and the most awkward ask, at the same time.
The case for putting it on the form is speed. The answer splits your list in one pass: people you can pursue, and people who get a gracious note and nothing more. Nobody wants to spend Sunday evening calling buyers who signed a representation agreement in March.
The case against is how it reads from the visitor's side. As a required field, "Are you working with an agent?" can feel like a toll gate. Answer correctly and you may see the house. Some represented buyers skip the sign-in to dodge a pitch. Some unrepresented buyers mark "yes" defensively because they think it ends the conversation. Either way, a required agent-status field is one of the open house sign in questions most likely to push someone past the iPad without stopping. Buyer-agent relationships also form early in the search. The consumer surveys collected in NAR's research and statistics consistently show most buyers settle on an agent near the start of the process, so a blunt checkbox misses the "still deciding" crowd, who are precisely the people worth meeting.
Asked out loud, the same question gets better answers, because it arrives with a smile and an exit ramp. If you have ever wondered what to ask open house visitors in the doorway, start with this, while they sign in or as you walk them toward the kitchen:
"Thanks for coming in. The kitchen's straight ahead, and the sign-in is just so the sellers know who's been through. Are you already working with an agent on your search, or still figuring that part out?"
If yes: "Great, they'll want to know you saw this one. Have a look around, and grab me if any questions come up."
If no or unsure: "No problem at all. I'll show you the two things about this house people don't notice on the listing, and if you'd like, I can send you a couple of similar homes nearby this week."
My verdict: ask it verbally as your default. If your market or your style makes the form version work, keep it optional, phrased softly ("Working with an agent? Yes / No / Not yet"), and never required. Then write the verbal answer into the visitor's notes the moment they move on. An answer you did not record is an answer you did not get.
Open house qualifying questions, one by one
The rest of your open house sign in questions deserve the same scrutiny: what the answer tells you, how to phrase it, and whether it earns required status.
Buying timeline
What it tells you: urgency, which is the backbone of your follow-up priority list. A visitor buying in the next three months gets a phone call tonight. A "just looking" visitor gets a friendly drip and zero pressure.
How to phrase it: "When are you hoping to move?" with tappable choices: 0–3 months / 3–6 months / 6–12 months / Just looking. Multiple choice matters here. It takes two seconds to answer and gives you clean segments instead of free-text guesses. And "just looking" must be an option. Honest neighbors and early-stage browsers need somewhere truthful to land or they will pick a lie.
Verdict: required. Of all the open house sign in questions on this page, this one does the most sorting work per tap. It is low-friction, expected, and nobody balks at it.
Pre-approval status
What it tells you: how real the timeline is. A 0–3 month buyer holding a pre-approval letter is your hottest possible lead. A 0–3 month buyer who has not talked to a lender needs a different first conversation, one that happens to include a lender introduction.
How to phrase it: softly. "Have you spoken with a lender yet?" with Yes / Not yet / Paying cash beats "Are you pre-approved?" every time. The first sounds like logistics; the second sounds like an audition. One honest caution about mortgage questions on free sign-in apps: sometimes they are part of the business model rather than part of your follow-up. Curb Hero is free because of lender co-marketing, and its own help center explains that a default lender may be assigned to your listings and that visitor info goes to that lender when visitors opt into the mortgage questions. A fair trade for some agents. Just make it a trade you chose knowingly, because your visitors will assume their answer went only to you.
Verdict: optional. Required open house sign in questions about money kill completions faster than anything else you can put on a screen. Asking a stranger to disclose their financing in someone else's kitchen is a big ask; make it skippable, and let the follow-up call surface it naturally. It usually does.
Neighborhood interest
What it tells you: whether this visitor is a lead for this listing or for you. "Only this neighborhood" buyers are candidates for this house and your other nearby listings. "Open to other areas" buyers are longer-term clients who need a search set up, not a second showing.
How to phrase it: "Mainly interested in this neighborhood, or open to others?" Two taps, no typing. The answer also feeds your seller report. "Six of nine visitors came for this neighborhood, not just any house" is the kind of line sellers repeat to their friends.
Verdict: optional. Useful and cheap to answer, but not worth a required slot. If your form supports it, make it visible but skippable.
How did you hear about this open house?
What it tells you: which marketing pulls people through the door. Zillow, the yard signs, Instagram, a neighbor's mention. This is the one entry in the whole set of open house sign in questions that serves you and your next listing presentation more than it serves the individual lead.
How to phrase it: "How did you hear about today's open house?" with your actual channels as choices plus Other. Keep the list short. Five options, not twelve.
Verdict: optional. Skip it entirely when it is 2pm on a Saturday and four groups are stacked up at the door; the contact info matters more than your marketing curiosity. On a quiet open house, the answers compound. After a season you will know which channels deserve your money, which is more than most app-roundup advice gets into. Comparison pieces like The Close's open house app guide evaluate the tools, but only your own source data tells you what fills your rooms.
Map every answer to a follow-up segment
Open house sign in questions only pay off if each answer routes the visitor somewhere on Monday. If an answer would not change what you do next, stop asking the question. This is the mapping that makes the four-plus-optional structure work:
| Answer on the form | Segment | First touch |
|---|---|---|
| 0–3 month timeline, no agent | Hot buyer | Call the same evening; reference their question from the house |
| 0–3 months, lender conversation started | Hot buyer (financing ready) | Call same evening; offer a private second showing |
| 3–6 month timeline, no agent | Warm buyer | Text or email next day with 2–3 similar homes |
| 6–12 months / "not yet" on lender | Nurture | Add to a monthly market-update list; no pressure |
| Working with an agent | Represented | One gracious note; no pitch, door left open |
| "Just looking" + lives nearby | Neighbor / future seller | Add to farm list; invite to your next open house |
| Only this neighborhood | Listing-specific lead | Include in the seller recap; alert them to price changes |
| Open to other areas | Search client | Offer to set up a custom search this week |
Every first touch in that table is a verb on purpose: a call, a text, a list, a note. A segment that does not tell your Monday self what to do is just a label.
Putting your open house sign in questions on a screen
Everything above works on paper, technically. In the field, a clipboard fights you on the two things that matter most. Paper cannot require a field, and every row gets re-typed by hand before any follow-up happens, which in my experience means Tuesday, if it happens at all. On a screen, your required open house sign in questions actually get enforced, the optional qualifiers are genuinely one tap to skip, and each answer lands in a segment instead of a column of handwriting.
This is the problem OpenHouse was built around: a form built around exactly these fields, name, phone, email, and timeline on one screen, optional qualifiers a tap away, no account creation, and no network connection required, because listing-house Wi-Fi is a rumor. Answers stay on your device until you export them, and no lender ads ride along with the mortgage question. Lock an iPad into a single app with Apple's Guided Access or a built-in kiosk mode and visitors get a clean, private form they can finish in under thirty seconds, which is the whole point. Try OpenHouse at your next open house and watch the completion rate against your old sheet.
The short version of this entire guide: require four fields, ask the agent question out loud, make everything else optional, and give every answer a destination. Treat your open house sign in questions as routing instructions for you, not a quiz for visitors.
Frequently asked questions
How many questions should an open house sign-in form have?
Require four fields — name, phone, email, and buying timeline — and make everything else optional. Each additional required question lowers completion rates, and a half-finished form with no contact info is worth nothing.
Should you put 'are you working with an agent?' on the sign-in form?
Usually not as a required field. On a form it can read as gatekeeping and pushes some visitors to skip signing in entirely. Asking it verbally with a friendly script gets more honest answers; if you keep it on the form, make it optional.
Should you ask about pre-approval at an open house?
Yes, but as an optional question with soft phrasing like 'Have you spoken with a lender yet?' Requiring a financial disclosure from a stranger in someone's kitchen costs you completions, and the verbal follow-up usually surfaces it anyway.
What are the most useful open house qualifying questions?
Buying timeline, agent status, pre-approval status, and neighborhood interest. Timeline and agent status tell you who to call tonight; pre-approval and neighborhood tell you what to say when you do.