Free tool
Open House Follow Up Time Calculator
See how many hours a month your open house follow up costs before anything is automated.
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Open House Cost Per Lead Calculator
Work out what one named open house visitor really costs once your own time is priced in.
Agents quote open house costs at the level of the flyer order, which badly understates the number. The honest total includes the boosted listing post, the printing, the amortized cost of frames and riders you reuse, the round trips to set and collect directional signs, and the four or five hours you spent in an entry hall instead of on listing appointments or buyer showings.
Enter your real numbers for a typical weekend. The calculator shows the cash you spent, the total once your time is priced at your own hourly value, and both figures divided by the number of groups who signed in. Compare the result against what you pay for a portal lead and you have a defensible answer for the next agent who tells you open houses are a waste of a Saturday.
Your result
Cash spent on this open
$123
Money that actually left your account for this weekend.
Total cost including your time
$370
Cash plus the selling hours the open house consumed.
Cost per signed in group
$26.46
The number to compare against a portal lead or a mailer.
Cash only cost per group
$8.79
Useful when a seller is covering the hard costs of the open.
Run this for three or four weekends and the average is what you should quote when a seller asks whether the open house was worth it.
Why groups, not heads
A couple walking through together is one buying decision and one follow up conversation. Counting four heads because two toddlers came along inflates your traffic and flatters your cost per lead, and it makes the seller report less useful than it should be.
Count the groups who put a name on the sign in, and count separately how many were already working with an agent. That second number is the one that explains a busy Sunday that produced no buyer calls, and it belongs in the seller recap alongside the raw traffic count.
Pricing your own hour honestly
Most agents put zero in the hourly value box the first time and get a comforting answer. That is not the number a business owner should use. A reasonable figure is your last twelve months of gross commission income divided by the hours you actually worked, which for most solo agents lands well above what people expect.
Once your time is priced, the comparison between formats sharpens. A four hour public open with fourteen sign ins and a two hour broker open with nine agents through the door look very different on cost per named visitor, and you can pick this weekend's format on evidence rather than habit.
Questions about this calculator
Should I include the cost of my sign frames every weekend?
Include a per weekend share rather than the full purchase. If a set of frames and riders costs you a couple of hundred dollars and lasts two seasons of weekly hosting, a few dollars per open is the honest allocation. Loading the whole purchase into one Saturday makes that weekend look absurd.
What is a good cost per signed in group?
There is no national benchmark worth quoting, because sign spend, market, and price point vary too much. Judge it against your own alternatives: what a portal lead costs you, what a farm mailer costs per response, and what your conversion rate is on each. Open houses often win on conversion even when they lose on raw cost.
Does a visitor who is already represented count as a lead?
Not as a buyer lead. They still count as traffic for the seller report and they occasionally become a referral source. For cost per lead purposes, run the number twice, once on all sign ins and once on unrepresented visitors only, and use the second figure when you are deciding where to spend.
More free tools and working documents
Working document
The Open House Lead Capture Checklist
Everything a solo host has to do to leave a Sunday open house with named visitors, a fed seller, and follow up already moving.
That number moves when the door table does
Whatever this calculator just said about your opens, the lever is the twenty seconds between hello and a name on the screen. Book a demo and we will run your same figures again with every group signed in and the follow up leaving on its own after lockup. You will see which line moves and by how much before you spend another Saturday in an entry hall.