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Inside an open house
About 50 people followed the balloon-laden signs to the open house at Panarama Court in McLean one Sunday afternoon. What had brought them there, on this cold, dreary April day?
“People come to open houses for a lot of reasons,” said Donna Paton, principal broker of Paton Real Estate in McLean. She was co-hosting the event with the listing agent, Tito Escobar.
On a street of traditional split-level houses, this $1,498,000 new Colonial fine home naturally attracted attention.
For this group of visitors, its attractions ranged from curiosity to cookies to choosing a home.
Lucille and Jackie Shepard agreed that they were in the “curious” category.
“We are just being nosy,” said Lucille, with a smile. A Maryland resident, she had come with her daughter-in-law Jackie, who lives around the corner on Opalocka Drive.
“We have been watching the house go up, and we wanted to see how it turned out,” Lucille added. “It is beautiful.”
Three-year-old Mats had been brought by his parents, Rakesh and Jaylene Raman of Alexandria. They were there to sign a contract for a Loudoun County home, but he found something that seemed much more interesting to him.
“Cookies!” he exclaimed, reaching up for the refreshments, while Paton and his parents stood in the kitchen reviewing the documents.
The cookies and coffeecake were strategically displayed on the granite kitchen counter. This location gave visitors an impressive view of the adjoining great room, with its elaborate wainscoting, fireplace and inland hardwood floors.
The pastries were provided by Gailmarie Goldrick, a mortgage banker with Wells Fargo.
She was answering finance questions for Dr. Kanchan Amand of McLean, while Kanchan's 9-year-old daughter Nikita explored the rooms.
“It is really pretty,” Nikita reported, on returning to the kitchen. “I like to see these houses.”
In this one, she said, she was especially fond of the sitting area in the master bath. Her mother said more simply that she was looking for a home like this.
About half of all open-house visitors are serious shoppers, Paton said.
The Briggs family was out house-hunting because a third child had recently been born. This made her parents even more concerned about the traffic along Brooks Road, near their current McLean home.
“It's the fifth house we have seen today, and it is the most beautiful,” Kimberly said. “The layout is nice, with the four bedrooms and three baths upstairs. But it is also the most expensive.”
“It's a cool house,” agreed Chuck Briggs, 12.
For him, the coolest room of all was the home theater downstairs. He later asked Kimberly to “please talk to Daddy and buy this house.”
Dr. Micheline Mescher was also thinking of her children's welfare, when she came from the Palladium Condos in McLean. In the process of adopting two youngsters from Colombia, she said her apartment is “not appropriate for two kids who need room to run around and play.”
Christine Jordan of Vienna had also visited five houses that day.
“After going to other open houses, we realized that we really liked this neighborhood,” she said.
Her two sons, Elijah and Gabe, also enjoyed the coffeecake before their father, Andrew, led them to the deck overlooking the back yard.
Mom, however, was much more interested in exploring the kitchen, thus helping prove the adage that the kitchen sells the house.
“Look at this!” she exclaimed. “You slam the drawers closed, but they do not slam. When they put in features like this, they are doing that little extra.”
In a rather roundabout way, Rez and Zahra Azad of Centreville were serious shoppers, too. They came to the house with their daughter Rana, 8, because they wanted a similar floor plan for the home they wanted to build. Now they were looking for an older McLean house, priced under $600,000, so they could tear it down and erect their new dwelling on its site. Donna briefly left the open house to show them another of her listed properties.
Although Realtors joke about “lookie loos,” who come to open houses for curiosity's sake with no intention of purchasing anything, a fair share of “lookie buyers” apparently show up as well.
Escobar recalled that one of his open houses attracted five contracts on the same day, 1 1/2 years ago.
Paton estimated that about half of all open-house visitors are in that “lookie buyer” group, just as they were this Sunday. She echoed many other Fairfax County Realtors by saying, “Recently, we have been getting the best turnout in two years.”
So all those “open house” signs may very well be helping to lead the way toward a market recovery.
Contact the writer at jfriedlander@timespapers.com
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