Open house sign in questions are a trade you negotiate in public, one stranger at a time. Every question you add tells you a little more about the person standing in the entryway. It also makes it a little more likely that the next visitor types a fake email, leaves half the fields blank, or walks straight past the iPad while their partner is already opening closet doors in the back bedroom. I have watched a lot of agents design an open house questionnaire around the answers they wish they had instead of the form a stranger will finish in thirty seconds. This guide covers the trade honestly: which open house sign in questions earn a required slot, which belong as optional fields, which work better out loud, and where each answer goes once you have it.
Every required question costs you completions
Your form has a budget, and each required field spends some of it. Name and phone are cheap; everyone expects to give those. A required pre-approval disclosure is expensive. A required "what's your current home worth?" is extortionate, and visitors pay you back with made-up answers or no sign-in at all.
You have seen this on paper. A sheet with ten columns gets three of them filled in, in handwriting you cannot read, and the bottom half of the page is blank because people stopped bothering somewhere around visitor twelve. Digital forms hide the problem better. They do not fix it. The longer your list of open house sign in questions, the fewer people finish, and the people you lose are disproportionately the polite, busy, qualified buyers. The neighbor with time to kill will happily fill out anything.
So pick a default for your open house sign in questions and defend it: four required fields, everything else optional or asked out loud. A short form completed by twenty visitors beats a thorough questionnaire completed by nine. The form captures the lead and one sorting signal. The conversation does the rest. Where the form fits in the bigger system (capture, triage, follow-up, seller recap) is covered in the full playbook, and this piece reads better alongside it.
The four fields worth requiring
- Full name. Beyond the obvious, it is what you scan on Monday when you cross-reference visitors against your database.
- Phone number. Your best contact channel. Texts get read; cold emails mostly do not.
- Email address. Your fallback channel, and what most CRMs use to match records.
- Buying timeline. The best sorting question you can put on a form, covered below.
That is the whole required form. Notice what is missing: agent status, pre-approval, price range, current address. Those answers matter, which is why the next two sections take each one on its own terms instead of bolting them on as required fields. Any candidate for your open house sign in questions has to beat one of these four for a required slot, and in fifteen years I have not met one that does. If you want printable and digital templates that use these questions, there is a separate guide with layouts you can copy directly.
"Are you working with an agent?" On the form, or out loud?
This is the most argued-over of all open house sign in questions, and for good reason. It is the most useful answer and the most awkward ask, at the same time.
The case for putting it on the form is speed. The answer splits your list in one pass: people you can pursue, and people who get a gracious note and nothing more. Nobody wants to spend Sunday evening calling buyers who signed a representation agreement in March.
The case against is how it reads from the visitor's side. As a required field, "Are you working with an agent?" can feel like a toll gate. Answer correctly and you may see the house. Some represented buyers skip the sign-in to dodge a pitch. Some unrepresented buyers mark "yes" defensively because they think it ends the conversation. Either way, a required agent-status field is one of the open house sign in questions most likely to push someone past the iPad without stopping. Buyer-agent relationships also form early in the search. The consumer surveys collected in NAR's research and statistics consistently show most buyers settle on an agent near the start of the process, so a blunt checkbox misses the "still deciding" crowd, who are precisely the people worth meeting.
Asked out loud, the same question gets better answers, because it arrives with a smile and an exit ramp. If you have ever wondered what to ask open house visitors in the doorway, start with this, while they sign in or as you walk them toward the kitchen:
"Thanks for coming in. The kitchen's straight ahead, and the sign-in is just so the sellers know who's been through. Are you already working with an agent on your search, or still figuring that part out?"
If yes: "Great, they'll want to know you saw this one. Have a look around, and grab me if any questions come up."
If no or unsure: "No problem at all. I'll show you the two things about this house people don't notice on the listing, and if you'd like, I can send you a couple of similar homes nearby this week."
My verdict: ask it verbally as your default. If your market or your style makes the form version work, keep it optional, phrased softly ("Working with an agent? Yes / No / Not yet"), and never required. Then write the verbal answer into the visitor's notes the moment they move on. An answer you did not record is an answer you did not get.
Open house qualifying questions, one by one
The rest of your open house sign in questions deserve the same scrutiny: what the answer tells you, how to phrase it, and whether it earns required status.
Buying timeline
What it tells you: urgency, which is the backbone of your follow-up priority list. A visitor buying in the next three months gets a phone call tonight. A "just looking" visitor gets a friendly drip and zero pressure.
How to phrase it: "When are you hoping to move?" with tappable choices: 0–3 months / 3–6 months / 6–12 months / Just looking. Multiple choice matters here. It takes two seconds to answer and gives you clean segments instead of free-text guesses. And "just looking" must be an option. Honest neighbors and early-stage browsers need somewhere truthful to land or they will pick a lie.
Verdict: required. Of all the open house sign in questions on this page, this one does the most sorting work per tap. It is low-friction, expected, and nobody balks at it.
Pre-approval status
What it tells you: how real the timeline is. A 0–3 month buyer holding a pre-approval letter is your hottest possible lead. A 0–3 month buyer who has not talked to a lender needs a different first conversation, one that happens to include a lender introduction.
How to phrase it: softly. "Have you spoken with a lender yet?" with Yes / Not yet / Paying cash beats "Are you pre-approved?" every time. The first sounds like logistics; the second sounds like an audition. One honest caution about mortgage questions on free sign-in apps: sometimes they are part of the business model rather than part of your follow-up. Curb Hero is free because of lender co-marketing, and its own help center explains that a default lender may be assigned to your listings and that visitor info goes to that lender when visitors opt into the mortgage questions. A fair trade for some agents. Just make it a trade you chose knowingly, because your visitors will assume their answer went only to you.
Verdict: optional. Required open house sign in questions about money kill completions faster than anything else you can put on a screen. Asking a stranger to disclose their financing in someone else's kitchen is a big ask; make it skippable, and let the follow-up call surface it naturally. It usually does.
Neighborhood interest
What it tells you: whether this visitor is a lead for this listing or for you. "Only this neighborhood" buyers are candidates for this house and your other nearby listings. "Open to other areas" buyers are longer-term clients who need a search set up, not a second showing.
How to phrase it: "Mainly interested in this neighborhood, or open to others?" Two taps, no typing. The answer also feeds your seller report. "Six of nine visitors came for this neighborhood, not just any house" is the kind of line sellers repeat to their friends.
Verdict: optional. Useful and cheap to answer, but not worth a required slot. If your form supports it, make it visible but skippable.
How did you hear about this open house?
What it tells you: which marketing pulls people through the door. Zillow, the yard signs, Instagram, a neighbor's mention. This is the one entry in the whole set of open house sign in questions that serves you and your next listing presentation more than it serves the individual lead.
How to phrase it: "How did you hear about today's open house?" with your actual channels as choices plus Other. Keep the list short. Five options, not twelve.
Verdict: optional. Skip it entirely when it is 2pm on a Saturday and four groups are stacked up at the door; the contact info matters more than your marketing curiosity. On a quiet open house, the answers compound. After a season you will know which channels deserve your money, which is more than most app-roundup advice gets into. Comparison pieces like The Close's open house app guide evaluate the tools, but only your own source data tells you what fills your rooms.
Map every answer to a follow-up segment
Open house sign in questions only pay off if each answer routes the visitor somewhere on Monday. If an answer would not change what you do next, stop asking the question. This is the mapping that makes the four-plus-optional structure work:
| Answer on the form | Segment | First touch |
|---|---|---|
| 0–3 month timeline, no agent | Hot buyer | Call the same evening; reference their question from the house |
| 0–3 months, lender conversation started | Hot buyer (financing ready) | Call same evening; offer a private second showing |
| 3–6 month timeline, no agent | Warm buyer | Text or email next day with 2–3 similar homes |
| 6–12 months / "not yet" on lender | Nurture | Add to a monthly market-update list; no pressure |
| Working with an agent | Represented | One gracious note; no pitch, door left open |
| "Just looking" + lives nearby | Neighbor / future seller | Add to farm list; invite to your next open house |
| Only this neighborhood | Listing-specific lead | Include in the seller recap; alert them to price changes |
| Open to other areas | Search client | Offer to set up a custom search this week |
Every first touch in that table is a verb on purpose: a call, a text, a list, a note. A segment that does not tell your Monday self what to do is just a label.
Putting your open house sign in questions on a screen
Everything above works on paper, technically. In the field, a clipboard fights you on the two things that matter most. Paper cannot require a field, and every row gets re-typed by hand before any follow-up happens, which in my experience means Tuesday, if it happens at all. On a screen, your required open house sign in questions actually get enforced, the optional qualifiers are genuinely one tap to skip, and each answer lands in a segment instead of a column of handwriting.
This is the problem OpenHouse was built around: a form built around exactly these fields, name, phone, email, and timeline on one screen, optional qualifiers a tap away, no account creation, and no network connection required, because listing-house Wi-Fi is a rumor. Answers stay on your device until you export them, and no lender ads ride along with the mortgage question. Lock an iPad into a single app with Apple's Guided Access or a built-in kiosk mode and visitors get a clean, private form they can finish in under thirty seconds, which is the whole point. Try OpenHouse at your next open house and watch the completion rate against your old sheet.
The short version of this entire guide: require four fields, ask the agent question out loud, make everything else optional, and give every answer a destination. Treat your open house sign in questions as routing instructions for you, not a quiz for visitors.
What to ask visitors at an open house
The form captures contact details and one qualifying signal. Everything else you learn at an open house, you learn from the conversation — and questions to ask open house visitors fall into two categories: the ones you ask because the answer changes your follow-up, and the ones you ask because they open the door to a real conversation.
The ones that change your follow-up: timeline (covered above), agent status, and whether they have seen similar homes in this price range. If a visitor has been looking for six months at this price point, they know the market, they have a frame of reference, and they are probably not going to be surprised by anything they find here. That is a buyer worth a longer conversation. A visitor who walked in off a yard sign and cannot name another neighborhood they have considered is a different call to have.
The ones that open a real conversation: what drew them to this neighborhood, what they noticed first walking through the door, whether anything surprised them about the house versus the photos. These questions tell you things you actually want to know — a detail that read wrong online, a feature that landed better in person, a concern they have not quite put into words yet. They are also questions that sound human, not transactional, which is why visitors answer them honestly.
There is a third category: questions that feel thorough and tell you nothing actionable. "What is your price range?" asked out loud gets either a vague answer or a defensive one, and the number people name at an open house is rarely the number that matters when they are sitting at a closing table. "What is most important to you in a home?" sounds like a questionnaire from a 2009 real estate school workbook. Neither of those belongs in your standard rotation.
Know what to ask at an open house before you walk in. A short list of three verbal questions — agent status, what attracted them to the neighborhood, and how long they have been looking — will give you better follow-up notes than ten minutes of form-filling would. For the verbatim scripts that stitch these questions into a complete doorway conversation, the open house scripts guide has sentence-by-sentence versions you can memorize or adapt.
Qualifying questions for open house buyers
Open house qualifying questions serve a narrow, honest purpose: they tell you which follow-up action to take on Monday. That is the only framework worth using. If the answer would not change what you do next, the question is not a qualifying question — it is curiosity dressed up as strategy.
By that standard, here is the full set of open house qualifying questions that actually qualify:
Are you working with an agent? The most binary of the bunch. The answer does not determine whether you are friendly — it determines whether you pitch your services or hand them back to whoever they are already working with. As noted above, ask this one out loud, where the tone can carry the nuance a checkbox cannot.
How long have you been looking? Short-timers are building preferences. Medium-timers (two to four months) know what they want and are running out of patience — the good kind of running out of patience. Long-timers (six-plus months) have either missed multiple offers and are recalibrating, or they are casual lookers who will not move this year. The length of the search maps almost directly to the kind of follow-up that serves them.
Have you seen anything you almost made an offer on? A question most agents never ask, and the most revealing one on this list. A buyer who almost pulled the trigger on another house knows exactly what they want. They have a real comparison point. They are not just browsing. A buyer who has seen forty homes and almost offered on none is a different conversation, one that might start with "what is getting in the way?" rather than with a listing recommendation.
What is drawing you to this specific neighborhood, or are you open to nearby areas? Answered in ten seconds, tells you whether this visitor is a lead for your listing or a lead for your buyer agent practice. A visitor locked into this zip code needs to hear about price changes and new listings here. A visitor open to the area next door needs a saved search and a different first email.
These are not screening questions — they are routing questions. The screening guide covers how to handle the rare visitor who is a security concern or clearly not a buyer at all, which is a different problem than qualifying. Here, the goal is a follow-up call that starts from something real, not a generic check-in.
Open house conversation starters
Open house conversation starters have one job: get a visitor talking before you get them signing. The signing matters — but a visitor who has already said three things to you is more likely to pause at the iPad than a visitor who walked past you without a word.
The best open house conversation starters share a structure: they are about the house or the neighborhood, not about you, and they have an obvious answer that is neither right nor wrong.
"What did you notice first when you walked in?" Works in any room, at any price point. The answer tells you something about their priorities (light, space, the kitchen, the entry), and there is no wrong answer, which means nobody feels cornered. If they mention a feature the listing photos undersell, make a note — that is seller feedback worth having.
"Have you been in this neighborhood before, or is this your first time exploring it?" Instantly splits visitors into "knows the area" and "still orienting." The first group wants to talk about what changed and what stayed the same. The second wants to know what the neighborhood is actually like to live in. Both are good conversations; you just start them differently.
"Were there any surprises in person versus the listing photos?" This is the one that gets candid answers, because it gives visitors permission to be honest without being rude. If they mention the yard is smaller than it looked, or the ceiling feels lower than expected, or the kitchen is actually much better — those are real signals. And it leads naturally into a follow-up: "Is that a dealbreaker, or just something to know?"
"How long have you been looking in this area?" Already in the qualifying section above, but it doubles as a conversation starter because it is genuinely curious, not transactional. People who have been looking for months have stories about what they have seen, what they liked, what did not work. That is a real conversation, and it happens to answer your qualifying question in the same breath.
What to ask at an open house is not a fixed script you run through in order. It is a short set of questions you know well enough to deploy based on how the conversation is going. If a visitor is chatty, lead with the observation questions and let the qualifying ones emerge naturally. If a visitor is quiet and clearly wants to look before they talk, point them toward the backyard or the primary suite, give them two minutes, and start fresh when they come back. The conversation starters that work are the ones that match the energy in the room.
For greeting scripts and transition lines that tie these questions into a full doorway routine, see the open house greeting script guide.
Frequently asked questions
How many questions should an open house sign-in form have?
Require four fields — name, phone, email, and buying timeline — and make everything else optional. Each additional required question lowers completion rates, and a half-finished form with no contact info is worth nothing.
Should you put 'are you working with an agent?' on the sign-in form?
Usually not as a required field. On a form it can read as gatekeeping and pushes some visitors to skip signing in entirely. Asking it verbally with a friendly script gets more honest answers; if you keep it on the form, make it optional.
Should you ask about pre-approval at an open house?
Yes, but as an optional question with soft phrasing like 'Have you spoken with a lender yet?' Requiring a financial disclosure from a stranger in someone's kitchen costs you completions, and the verbal follow-up usually surfaces it anyway.
What are the most useful open house qualifying questions?
Buying timeline, agent status, pre-approval status, and neighborhood interest. Timeline and agent status tell you who to call tonight; pre-approval and neighborhood tell you what to say when you do.
What should you ask visitors at an open house beyond the sign-in form?
Three questions do most of the work: whether they are working with an agent, what specifically attracted them to this house, and how long they have been looking. The first tells you how to follow up, the second gives you a hook for the seller, and the third tells you how serious the search is.
What are good open house conversation starters that do not feel like a pitch?
Start with the house, not with you. Ask what drew them to this neighborhood, or what they noticed first walking in. These questions open a real conversation, give you useful feedback for the seller, and create a natural transition to follow-up questions about their search.
How do you qualify buyers at an open house without sounding intrusive?
Anchor every question in helpfulness. "Are you looking to move before the school year?" is warmer than "What is your timeline?" and gets the same answer. Tie the qualification question to something specific about the house or their situation, and most buyers answer without hesitation.