The Open House/Open Heart

I was raised in a home with an open door policy. My aunt two young cousins lived with us one summer while she relocated from Northern to Southern California. There was a family from Amsterdam who stayed long-term, my high school friend, and there were others. No one ever came for a week or a weekend; they came for a month or three, sometimes a year. They spoke languages I’d never heard of, made picnics with foods far from my familiar suburban tastes. I learned to accommodate, to share my bike, I taught their children to swim. In exchange for the hospitality and saving their kids from drowning, I to Disneyland a lot.

As a REALTOR this “open house” thing still bears the imprint of my mother’s ideology. On any given Sunday, I choose a listing, put out signs and balloons, cookies if I’m feeling generous—and fling wide the doors to greet the world. But here is where my childhood trumps my sales training:

• I don’t make people “sign in”, though their address would be handy for the requisite thank you note.
• I don’t play Catch the Client; trailing them through the house with a string of questions about the reasons for their move and their need for closet space.

We respected privacy in our post-civil-rights-movement house.

• I don’t do the hard sell. I play it like I wanted my parents to greet me when I came home from school as a teenager— be friendly but not overly glad to see me. Offer me a cookie and if I want to talk to you I will. Most of the conversation taking place as I’m hitting the door to go back out; the “don’t forget your coat or don’t be out too late” type of thing.

I’m sure there are REALTORS who’d think I’m nuts but it works for me. It’s a solitary openness. The open door of my childhood taught me to read people in the quiet actions of their daily routines, the signs and silences between them told me more than their words. With each group of houseguests there was always someone who I came to adore without effort and the same thing happens at an open house. Every weekend I will meet someone I click with, someone who I feel compelled to work with to help them find what they’re looking for. As we’re chatting at the doorway, we will know it. I’ll offer you my card and one last cookie, confident we’ll see each other again. And from that moment on—it’s Disneyland.

~Tracy Schaffer