Pack five sub-kits, not one bin. Grouped that way you can see what is missing in ten seconds, because each group has one job and one failure mode. Two rules decide half of what goes in, and most packing lists mention neither: your city caps how many directional signs you may legally put out, and your sign-in tablet has a published temperature range that a parked car exceeds. For the order of operations on the day itself, use the open house checklist. What follows is the bag.
What goes in the bag: five sub-kits and the failure each one prevents
Most kit lists hand you one long column of gear and a plastic bin. A bin tells you nothing about what is missing until a visitor is already at the door. Split the same gear five ways and each group carries one job.
| Sub-kit | What it holds | The failure it prevents | Where it rides |
|---|---|---|---|
| Signage | Directional signs, riders, stakes, mallet, zip ties, painter's tape | Nobody finds the house | Trunk |
| Tech | Sign-in tablet, weighted stand, power bank, long cable, hotspot | You lose every name from the event | Carried in with you |
| Paper | Backup sign-in sheets, clipboard, pens, flyers, cards, forms folder | The tablet dies and the day keeps going | Carried, flat, in a folder |
| Hospitality | Water, wrapped snacks, napkins, shoe covers, trash bag, paper towels | Visitors leave early, or the seller's floors pay for it | Trunk, restocked weekly |
| Safety | Charged phone on your body, noise maker, flashlight, doorstop | You are alone in a house with strangers | On your person |
The last two columns are the ones kit lists leave out, and they do the sorting. If you cannot name the failure an item prevents, it does not go in the bag.
Signage: your city decides how many signs you can put out
Plenty of kit articles tell you to pack six to ten directional signs and a bag of balloons. In a lot of American cities that list is a code violation before you park. Orange County REALTORS publishes the sign ordinance for each city in its area, and neighboring cities are nowhere near each other:
| City | Size cap | Placement rule | Hours | Balloons and flags |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aliso Viejo | 4 sq ft, 3 ft tall including the post | Two per intersection, six per event. No public sidewalks, streets or medians | 8 a.m. to sunset | "No flags, pennants, balloons, A-frames, or other attention-attracting devices" |
| Brea | 24 by 24 in with rider, 3 ft 6 in total height | One per location per agent, at least 1,000 ft apart | 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. | Two small flags allowed to 4 ft 6 in. No sail flags, sign twirlers or banners |
| Newport Beach | 1.5 sq ft (216 sq in), 4 ft tall | One extra on-site sign plus up to three off-site, private property only | Not stated in the summary | Flags, pennants, balloons and streamers not permitted |
Three neighboring cities, three different caps. A sign that is legal in Aliso Viejo is more than twice the allowed area in Newport Beach. Brea publishes what repeat violations cost: $100 for a first, $200 for a second, $500 for each additional sign found in violation. Your signage quantity is a lookup in your own city's code. Search it for "real estate sign" or "open house sign," or check whether your local association publishes a table like the one above. Do it once per farm area and write the answer on the lid of your sign box.
| Signage item | Quantity | Why this spec |
|---|---|---|
| Directional signs | Your city's cap, commonly 4 to 6 | Over the cap is a citation, not more traffic |
| Arrow riders | 1 per sign, plus 2 spares | Arrows snap and warp before the sign does |
| H-wire stakes or A-frames | 1 per sign, plus 2 | H-wire for turf, A-frame for hardscape. Aliso Viejo bans A-frames outright, so check before you buy a set |
| Rubber mallet | 1 | August soil does not take a stake by hand |
| Zip ties, 8 in | 20 | Legal pole and fence mounting where allowed |
| Painter's tape | 1 roll | Interior arrows that leave no mark |
| Door sign with your QR code | 1 | Sends visitors to the form before you finish a sentence. Build one with the open house QR code generator |
The tech sub-kit, and why the trunk is the wrong place for it
Every kit article says to keep the bin in your trunk. Half the bin should never live there. Apple states that iPhone and iPad are designed to operate in ambient temperatures of 0 to 35 degrees C (32 to 95 F) and to be stored between -20 and 45 degrees C (-4 to 113 F), then says outright: "Don't leave your device in a car, because temperatures in parked cars can exceed this range."
That one sentence splits the kit. Signs, stakes, the mallet and cleaning supplies ride in the trunk permanently. The tablet, the power bank, the printed sheets and the flyers come inside with you.
| Tech item | Spec that matters | Failure it prevents |
|---|---|---|
| Sign-in tablet | Charged to 100 percent the night before, screen sleep off | A dead device at 11 a.m. with three groups at the door |
| Weighted stand | Heavy base, 10 to 12 in tall, angled toward the visitor | A tablet that gets knocked off an entry table |
| Power bank | 10,000 mAh or larger, USB-C PD at 20 W or more | Running the full window away from an outlet |
| Charging cable | 10 ft, not the 3 ft one in the box | Your station is where the door is, not where the outlet is |
| Wall adapter | 20 W or higher | A 5 W brick charges slower than a kiosk drains |
| Kiosk lock | Guided Access on iPad, or the app's own kiosk mode | A visitor tapping out of the form into your email |
Set the station up once and copy that setup every time. The iPad open house kiosk guide covers Guided Access, stand placement and the battery strategy step by step.
Measure one number for yourself: what the battery reads after three hours on a sign-in screen. Apple publishes a video-playback rating, which is a different workload from a screen-on kiosk at high brightness, and nobody has published an independent test of the kiosk workload. Run one open house on battery, note the percentage left, and pack to that.
When there is no signal: packing for a dead-zone listing
NAR's 2024 REALTORS and Member Safety Residential Report found that 48 percent of residential members had shown vacant properties in areas with poor or no phone coverage in the past 12 months. The same report puts a second number on those listings: 34 percent felt unsafe while showing vacant properties in poor-coverage areas.
A sign-in app that posts every entry to a server has nothing to fall back on there. One that writes to the device and syncs later keeps working. We build the second kind, so read this paragraph as a vendor's opinion and test it against your own gear. Offline lead capture is what the app does at a dead-zone listing, and paper versus digital sign-in covers the tradeoff honestly.
For a listing you suspect is dead, pack printed backup sheets, a hotspot if your carrier covers the area, and five minutes to test your sign-in app in airplane mode before you leave the office.
The paper sub-kit: backup sheet, forms folder, and what the door actually requires
Paper is the failover, and it weighs almost nothing.
- Two printed sign-in sheets, 20 lines each. Print them with the open house sign-in sheet maker so the columns match the fields your app collects.
- One clipboard, hard backing.
- Three pens. Pens walk. Three is the number that survives an afternoon.
- 25 to 40 property flyers, depending on the traffic your last open at this price point drew.
- 30 business cards, in a case, not loose in the bag.
- A flat folder holding whatever your state and brokerage require you to have at the door. The written-buyer-agreement question sits in NAR settlement rules and open houses. The folder rides with you either way.
- A small notepad for neighbor and seller notes, because typing while someone talks reads as rude.
Keep the whole sub-kit flat in one folder. Rolled flyers and curled sheets are the tell of a bag that lives in a trunk.
Hospitality without liability: water, snacks, scent and the candle question
Water in a cooler bag with an ice pack, not warm in the trunk. A dozen 8 oz bottles covers a three-hour window at most price points. Snacks individually wrapped, nothing needing a plate, nothing that leaves crumbs on a seller's carpet. Napkins, paper towels, a trash bag you take away with you. Twenty pairs of shoe covers in a basket by the door with a mat under it.
Then the candle. Most kit lists tell you to bring a scented one. NFPA's home candle fires fact sheet counts an annual average of 8,690 US home structure fires started by candles over 2011 to 2015, causing 82 civilian deaths, 800 civilian injuries and $295 million in direct property damage. Three of every five started when something that could burn sat too close to the flame, and in 16 percent the candle was unattended or abandoned.
Unattended is the whole job description of an open house host. You are at the door, or in the kitchen with a buyer, or upstairs answering a question about the roof. You cannot watch a flame in a house you do not own. Use nothing, open the windows 20 minutes before the start, or bring a flameless plug-in warmer and unplug it on the way out.
One more thing worth knowing while you decide: no study links scent, cookies or baking smells to offer counts, offer price or days on market in residential real estate. The ambient-scent research that exists is retail-store research, and it does not transfer to a house someone is buying.
The safety sub-kit: what agents actually carry, by NAR's own survey
The same NAR report puts numbers on this. Seventeen percent of residential members felt unsafe hosting an open house alone in the past 12 months. Among members who feared for their personal safety, 34 percent named an open house, the highest single answer, ahead of threatening messages and showings at 31 percent each. Five percent said a client reported a theft during an open house.
What members carry, per that survey: 54 percent carry a self-defense weapon or tool, broken down as pepper spray 22 percent, firearm 17 percent, pocket knife 9 percent, high-powered flashlight 7 percent, taser 6 percent, battery-operated noise maker 4 percent. Sixty-five percent use a smartphone safety app, most often the Find My iPhone feature at 40 percent and Forewarn at 21 percent.
The physical carry list that follows from that:
- Your phone, charged, on your body. Not on the sign-in table, which is the one place you will walk away from.
- A battery-operated noise maker or personal alarm, clipped, not buried.
- A high-powered flashlight. It doubles as the tool for a dark basement or a crawlspace question.
- A rubber doorstop for a room you want to keep closed.
- A second person. The only line here you cannot buy, and the one 17 percent of members were missing when they felt unsafe hosting alone.
Carry law and brokerage policy differ by state and by firm, so check both before you pack anything on that list, and read NAR's REALTOR Safety Program material for the protocol. Behavior and response belong on the open house safety checklist.
What to leave out of the bag
| Leave out | Reason |
|---|---|
| Lit candles of any kind | See the NFPA figures above |
| Balloons, pennants and sail flags | Aliso Viejo and Newport Beach ban them outright, Brea allows only two small flags. Check your city before you pack any |
| Food needing a plate, a fridge or a serving utensil | Crumbs, spills and a liability conversation you do not want |
| Anything with a cord across a walkway | You cannot watch a trip hazard and greet at the door at once |
| A second unattended device in another room | One door, one station, one set of eyes |
| Your laptop, personal mail, spare lockbox keys | Five percent of members had a client report a theft during an open house |
| The seller's medications and valuables | They leave with the seller. NAR reports 52 percent of members encourage clients to remove medications and 33 percent to keep them in a locked safe |
| Recruiting or commission material | Wrong audience, wrong room |
The restock ritual, and packing for a two-open Sunday
Restock on Sunday night, not Saturday morning. The morning version fails because the shortage and the fix are separated by a store that is not open yet.
Four moves. Pull the trash bag and the leftover water. Plug the tablet and the power bank in. Count pens, cards, flyers and shoe covers back to their numbers. Check the arrow riders for cracks. Ten minutes, done standing up.
Two opens in one day changes the plan. Carry two complete paper folders, because sharing one folder means one of the two houses runs out. Charge the power bank fully between events rather than trusting what is left in it. And if the listings sit in different cities, treat them as two signage plans with two different caps, since the counts above show how far apart neighboring rules can be. Sequencing for a multi-listing day lives in running multiple open houses.
Open home bag, agent tote, listing kit: the same bag under different names
Agents in New Zealand and Australia say open home rather than open house, and the bag is called an open home bag. In the UK the event is a viewing. The inventory holds in all three: signage within the local rules, a capture device, paper, hospitality, safety.
A listing kit is a different bag. That one holds a CMA, a pre-listing packet and a measuring tool, and it goes to appointments, not to a Sunday open. Do not merge them. The merged bag is heavier than either one and you will stop carrying it. Promotion gear (neighbor invites, flyers for the surrounding blocks) has its own page in how to promote an open house, and agents building their first bag should start with open house tips for new agents.
What nobody publishes about open house kits
Kit articles are full of confident numbers that no one measures. Checked September 3, 2026, none of the following exists in a citable source:
- What a kit costs to build or restock. No association, brokerage or trade survey breaks out open-house supplies. The nearest published figure is NAR's data on agent income: a median of $8,010 in business expenses in 2024, with vehicles the largest category, and no supplies line item at all.
- The optimal number of directional signs, or any measured link between sign count and visitor count. The only hard numbers attached to sign counts are legal caps, which is the opposite of an optimum.
- How often a digital sign-in fails mid-event. No vendor and no association publishes a rate. A vendor status page measures a server, not a tablet at a doorway.
- The share of agents who carry a paper backup sheet. Not in the Member Profile, not in the Member Safety Report.
- How many open houses are held in the US per year. NAR reports how buyers found the home they bought, not a count of events, and no MLS aggregate is published.
- Whether cookies, baking smells or scent change offers, price or days on market. No residential real-estate study.
- What gets stolen at open houses, by item. Only the 5 percent client-theft figure above. The line about medications being the most stolen item is folklore.
- How often sign ordinances are enforced, or the average fine. Cities publish penalty schedules, nobody publishes citation counts.
- The recommended weight of an open house bag. Invented by kit articles, published by no one.
Where a figure does not exist, measure your own. Time your tablet. Count your signs against your city's code. Write both on the lid of the box.
Frequently asked questions
What should a realtor bring to an open house?
Pack five groups. Signage: directional signs within your city's legal cap, riders, stakes, a rubber mallet. Tech: a charged sign-in tablet, a weighted stand, a 10,000 mAh power bank, a 10-foot cable. Paper: two printed backup sign-in sheets, a clipboard, three pens, flyers, business cards, a forms folder. Hospitality: bottled water, wrapped snacks, 20 pairs of shoe covers, napkins, a trash bag. Safety: a charged phone carried on your body, a flashlight, a noise maker, a doorstop.
How many open house signs should I put out?
The number comes from your city's code, not from a blog. Orange County REALTORS publishes the per-city rules for its area, and they differ sharply: Aliso Viejo caps off-site directional signs at four square feet and three feet tall, allows two per intersection and six per event, and bars flags, pennants, balloons and A-frames. Brea keeps directional signs at least 1,000 feet apart, 24 by 24 inches maximum, 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Newport Beach limits real estate signs to 1.5 square feet. Look up your own city before you buy a set of ten.
Can I keep my open house kit in the car?
Half of it. Signs, stakes, the mallet and cleaning supplies are fine in the trunk. Apple states that iPhone and iPad are designed to operate between 0 and 35 degrees C (32 to 95 F) and to be stored between -20 and 45 degrees C (-4 to 113 F), and adds: don't leave your device in a car, because temperatures in parked cars can exceed this range. The tablet, the power bank and the printed paper come inside with you.
Should I bring a scented candle to an open house?
No open flame. NFPA counted an annual average of 8,690 US home structure fires started by candles over 2011 to 2015, causing 82 civilian deaths, 800 injuries and $295 million in direct property damage, with the candle unattended or abandoned in 16 percent of them. An agent working a door cannot watch a flame in a house they do not own. Open windows 20 minutes before the start, or use a flameless plug-in.
What do I need if the listing has no cell signal?
NAR's 2024 REALTORS and Member Safety Residential Report found that 48 percent of residential members had shown vacant properties in areas with poor or no phone coverage in the past 12 months. Pack a sign-in app that writes to the device rather than to a server, printed backup sheets, and a hotspot if your carrier covers the area. Test the app in airplane mode before you leave the office, not at the door.
What safety items do agents actually carry at open houses?
NAR's 2024 REALTORS and Member Safety Residential Report records that 54 percent of residential members carry a self-defense weapon or tool: pepper spray 22 percent, a firearm 17 percent, a pocket knife 9 percent, a high-powered flashlight 7 percent, a taser 6 percent and a battery-operated noise maker 4 percent. Sixty-five percent use a smartphone safety app. Carry rules vary by state law and brokerage policy, so check both before you pack anything in that list.