Home Buying

‘We found human remains in a kitchen cabinet.’

When open houses get weird, real estate agents get creative.

Snakes, creeps, bathroom stink "bombs," and overly determined buyers ... Adobe Stock

By Rachel Kurzius, Washington Post

May 21, 2024

The whole point of open houses is that anyone can come. Still, Dana Jackins, a real estate agent with Stansfield Signature, was pretty concerned when one guest slithered up to the door of a listing in Vienna, Va., right as the event was starting.

“One visitor for the open house came to me in the kitchen and whispered: ‘There’s a snake. I think it’s a copperhead,’” Jackins recalls.

The homeowner had warned her that the snakes — whose venom can cause significant pain and swelling — lived in the area, but Jackins never dreamed that one would appear on the porch at just about the worst moment possible. Unable to deal with it herself (she was all dressed up and doing her best to chat with potential buyers), Jackins and a colleague called a neighbor to help. He hurried over with a shovel to get rid of the reptile, which wriggled into a nearby hole as Jackins stood in front of a window, blocking the action from the crowd milling around inside. One silver lining: That neighbor eventually became a client, forever nicknamed “Snake Man” within the brokerage.

Although real estate agents are split on whether open houses actually help sell homes, there seem to be two universal truths about them: The practice helps agents expand their client base (hello, Snake Man), and, when you welcome large numbers of random people into a listing and ply them with cookies and champagne, extremely strange things can happen.

Among the most common attendees at open houses are neighbors. The good thing about them is they tend to fill up the place, raising the anxiety — and the offers — of serious buyers. But they’ve also been known to share information that agents would rather they didn’t, or that they didn’t know themselves.

That’s what happened to Javier Alomia, founder of Alomia Group Real Estate in Portland, Ore. Just as people were filtering out of a bustling open house in a trendy area of the city, a neighbor told a bunch of them that the location was previously a meth house — a detail the seller had neglected to share with Alomia. In Oregon, that information legally must be disclosed to buyers, because of the potential presence of hazardous chemicals. So, Alomia scrambled to amend the disclosure form and share the information with new arrivals.

Another major wild card is the bathroom. Agents say that, on a somewhat frequent basis, a visitor will use the facilities and, in doing so, stink up an entire floor of the house. Lydia Hallay, a broker at Living Room Realty in Portland, Ore., has a more befuddling story on the topic. A week after holding an open house at one of their listings, they were on-site again while the buyer conducted an inspection. But a horrible smell brought the proceedings to a halt, and no one could figure out the source. Hallay went as far as bringing in a carpet specialist to suss out whether the carpeting was to blame.

The smell became a sticking point in final negotiations. At last, the mystery was solved when the home-stagers were packing up the furniture and decor. “Someone had apparently pooped inside of a flower vase that was used as staging in the bathroom,” Hallay says. “And, like, who does that?”

That unpleasant anecdote underlines the biggest issue for both agents and their clients when it comes to open houses: security. Agents generally advise homeowners who are still living at the property to secure all of their belongings, especially jewelry and prescription drugs, the two items most likely to go missing during an event in which visitors are allowed and even encouraged to rifle through drawers, cabinets, and closets.

It’s also wise to remove or hide away deeply personal items. Once, while touring an otherwise vacant property with a client, “we found human remains in a kitchen cabinet,” Hallay says. They were in an urn labeled with a sweet message to the deceased, obviously forgotten by the house’s previous occupants. Hallay contacted the listing agent to let him know that “someone had been left behind.”

Sometimes, though, one agent’s disaster is another agent’s gain. Joan Stansfield, owner of Stansfield Signature Real Estate in the Washington, D.C., area, once got a new client after she’d fired her previous agent because of a robbery that took place during the open house. The previous agent had been holding the event, Stansfield says, when two thieves entered, posing as interested buyers. One of the men distracted the agent with conversation while the other went upstairs to break into a safe with a crowbar that he’d hidden in his pants, ultimately stealing jewelry.

Many female agents also have stories to share about their own safety concerns during open houses, including of visitors who made them feel uncomfortable or worse. They often try to schedule the event with multiple staffers to avoid being alone.

Safety and security concerns are why some sellers hesitate to put a for-sale sign out front, advertising that their house could be empty and vulnerable. Agents tend to see both sides of this debate: “There are some situations where maybe you have a vacant house and it just has a really busy street, and having an open-[house] sign might draw unwanted attention to the property,” Hallay says. “But, in most cases, I think signs are really helpful. … I always put a sign out when I’m hosting an open house, and, in fact, I’ve put five or six signs out sometimes depending on the location of the property and what kind of bystander traffic might be going by.”

Even so, agents largely agree that serious buyers are more likely to come for a private showing. For them, an open house might be a chance to take a second look, or to size up the competition before writing an offer.

Missy Raffa encountered such buyers at an open house she threw last year. The couple had already been through for a showing with their agent a day or so after the property hit the market. But at the open house, they returned with two more family members in tow. After a long tour, Raffa says, the four of them took it upon themselves to camp out in the kitchen for an extremely long time, eyeing the other visitors. They were “just trying to make sure that I knew that they wanted the house, and I definitely got the message,” says Raffa, an agent and broker with RE/Max in the Washington, D.C., area.

Ultimately, that family did win. But it had nothing to do with their efforts at the open house, Raffa says. It was because “their offer was insane.”