Yoo-hoo, looky-loos

EACH weekend, Cathy Tauber fights the urge to follow those ubiquitous signs meant to lure drivers from their intended destinations to homes for sale.

No, Tauber isn’t in the market for a house. In fact, she just finished a major remodel of the Topanga home she has owned since 1999.

“I just like to look,” Tauber said.

And for this, real estate agents love her.

Curiosity may be real estate’s greatest marketing tool. Anything that gets people into a house for sale -- open houses, virtual tours, handout CDs -- is a good thing from an agent’s standpoint. It matters not whether lookers are qualified buyers or even, as in Tauber’s case, if they are buyers at all.

“They may know someone,” said agent Shirley Tenger of Prudential California Realty. Tenger’s first sale came from an open house in Glendale. A neighbor who had come in called the next day saying she had friends who wanted to see the house. Tenger showed it, and they wrote an offer on the spot. That was 1985 and she has been an open-house believer ever since.

Following this line of reasoning, some realty agents hold open houses targeted at just the neighbors. “A neighbor may have a friend or a sister who they’ve been trying to get to move to the area. This is a great way of letting them know to get the word out,” said Susan Cosentino of Pritchett-Rapf’s Malibu Colony office.

It’s also a great way to pick up decorating tips and just plain snoop, agents admit.

Voyeurism aside, open houses are a staple in most agents’ marketing arsenal. Many sellers insist their agents hold them, even though in their more candid moments, agents say that open houses don’t generally yield a buyer for the featured house. They do, however, help agents bolster their client list of buyers. And those “neighbors-only” open houses are a chance for agents to meet future home sellers.

In terms of effectiveness, the Internet and virtual tours may have surpassed the open house as an agent’s frontline marketing tool. A 2005 California Assn. of Realtors study found that 68% of buyers used the Internet to preview homes through tours and photos and 75% used it to identify the homes they wanted their agents to show them.

Coldwell Banker agents Gail Lowe and partner Joyce Harczo now give clients and others who tour their listings CDs that serve as a take-home reminder. They include still photos and other information that is also contained on the pair’s website.

“The CDs are especially useful if people have seen more than one house that day,” Lowe said. “It helps them remember which is which.”

Lowe, who holds open houses regularly, said they often prove “educational” to the seller. “We get to see what people like and don’t like about a property.”

Some properties, she said, simply don’t lend themselves to an open house. Take one with a narrow, steep driveway. That’s best shown by an agent who whisks right up, subtly showing the buyer the ease of traversing it.

For sellers, attending open houses in the neighborhood can help determine how to price their own homes. For buyers who are just sticking a toe in the real estate waters, open houses are an anonymous way of seeing what’s out there without the commitment of making an appointment for a showing and having to later disengage from an agent’s grip.

Sometimes an open house does attract a buyer. Listing agent Karen Dannenbaum of Coast & Canyon Realtors in Topanga recalled the time she inaugurated a listing with a public open house. Fairly priced in a choice location, there were three offers on the home by the end of the day. Things didn’t work out and the sellers withdrew the house from the market, but had one of the offers been accepted, Dannenbaum said, it would have been the first time in her two-decade career that an open house actually led to a sale.

“I hold them because sellers expect me to,” she said.

There is one kind of open house that does seem to yield results: a caravan for other agents, held weekly or bimonthly, depending on the number of homes just coming on the market. The importance of a caravan can’t be minimized, said agent Cosentino.

“Think of it as a debut,” she said. The agents in the area are invited, and if it’s a hot listing, the expectation is that they’ll race for their cellphones to call their house-hunting clients.

But the trick is getting the agents there, and for this, Cosentino -- mom to six children -- knows the best bait: food. She cooks or she has it catered. The higher the house is in a canyon or the steeper its driveway, the better her menu offerings will be. Canyon roads closed from landslides and detours involved? Expect a feast.

“Realtors are a tough crowd,” Cosentino said. “And food works; what can I say?”

When Cosentino began selling real estate four years ago, she would beg more experienced agents to let her baby-sit their listings on open houses in the hope of generating her own roster of buyers.

Listening to the wisdom of her peers, she gleaned such gems as, “If you want to separate the serious buyers from the looky-loos, check out what they are driving.”

And sure enough, during one of her first open houses, on Malibu’s Broad Beach, in walked a guy ready to make an offer on the spot.

“He was my first sale -- $1.3 million,” she said. “I still remember it.”

He drove to her office to write the offer in a red Ferrari.