By Diana Pullen | Listing Specialist, Real Broker LLC | Serving Redmond, Bend, Terrebonne, Culver, Sisters, Prineville, Madras, La Pine, and surrounding communities
Open houses have a reputation in real estate as a necessary part of selling your home. Set up the cookies, prop open the door, smile at strangers wandering through your living room for two hours on a Sunday. Most sellers tolerate them because they assume they’re required.
They’re not. And in many cases, they tell you something more useful than they actually accomplish.
What an Open House Actually Does
A well-timed open house, specifically one held in the first week or two after a home hits the market, serves one very useful purpose: it’s a temperature gauge for how well you priced.
If people show up, browse, ask questions, and a few of them schedule follow-up private showings, you priced it right. The market is interested. Keep going.
If nobody comes, or the handful of people who do wander through are neighbors satisfying their curiosity and not actual buyers, the market has spoken. And what it’s saying is that the price isn’t right. People will drop into an open house with no appointment, no obligation, just casual curiosity; it’s the lowest-friction way to see a home that exists. If buyers can’t be bothered to do even that, the price is the problem.
That’s actually useful information. An early open house gives you real-time feedback that would otherwise take weeks of private showing data to surface.
When Open Houses Stop Being Useful
After the first week or two on market, the value of holding repeated open houses drops significantly. If your home didn’t generate traction in the first open house, holding a second and third one is not going to fix the underlying issue. The market already knows your home exists. It’s priced into their comparison and it didn’t make the cut at the current price.
Continued open houses at that stage tend to serve the agent more than the seller. They’re a way to meet new buyers for other listings, which is legitimate for the agent but not particularly useful for you. If you’re sitting at 45 days on market with three open houses behind you and no offer, the conversation needs to be about price, not about scheduling another Sunday afternoon.
How Homes Actually Sell in 2026
The overwhelming majority of buyers in Central Oregon find homes online before they ever contact an agent or schedule a showing. They’re on Zillow, Realtor.com, and the MLS at 10pm deciding which homes make their list. Your photos, your price, and your online presence do more work than any open house ever will.
What generates offers is: correct pricing, strong professional photography, accurate and complete listing information, and an MLS presence that makes your home easy to find and easy to evaluate from a screen. A buyer who decides your home is worth seeing will schedule a private showing. That’s where offers come from, not from someone who wandered in off the street on a Sunday.
Private showings also give buyers more comfort to look carefully, ask real questions, and take their time; all things that move them toward an offer. An open house with six other people walking through simultaneously creates a different kind of environment.
So Do You Need Open Houses at All?
One early open house: yes, I recommend it. The market feedback is worth having and it can generate early showing activity that momentum builds from.
Repeated open houses after that first one: only if there’s a specific reason, like a price reduction that you want to announce with fresh activity, or a newly listed competing home that makes a fresh push useful.
Mandatory weekly open houses as a default part of the listing plan: no. That’s not where sales happen and it’s not worth disrupting your life every Sunday for a strategy that’s doing more for your agent’s prospecting than for your transaction.
A good listing agent will be honest with you about what’s actually working and what’s not. If private showings are happening and buyers are engaged, open houses are optional. If nothing is happening, the answer is almost never another open house. It’s a price conversation.
What Actually Moves a Home in Central Oregon
The Redmond market in 2026 shows a median of 40 days on market for closed sales, with more than half of homes going under contract within 30 days. The homes in that fast group are not there because they held more open houses. They’re there because they were priced correctly from day one, showed well online, and gave buyers a reason to act.
That’s the formula. And none of it requires you to spend your Sundays answering questions from neighbors who have no intention of buying.
If you’re thinking about selling your Redmond or Central Oregon home and want to talk through what a realistic, low-disruption selling strategy looks like, I’m happy to have that conversation.
Diana Pullen, listing specialist in Redmond and Central Oregon, Real Broker LLC.
https://www.calendly.com/diana-soldincentraloregon/consult
Market data reflects Redmond Oregon MLS closed sales as of 2026. This post is for informational purposes only.
