Essay · 14 November 2025 · 6 min read
Why we refuse open days
An open day shows a house to forty people at the wrong hour. We would rather show it to four at the right one.
The open day exists for the agent, not the building. It compresses viewings into one convenient block, which is efficient for scheduling and disastrous for architecture, because a house that was drawn around four in the afternoon in October is being shown at eleven on a Saturday in June.
It also creates a crowd, and a crowd changes how people look. Nobody stands still in a room with eleven other people in it, and standing still is most of what looking at a building consists of.
We show houses one party at a time, twice, and the second viewing is at the hour the architect drew for. It costs us diary flexibility and it is the reason our median time to offer is nineteen days.
Written by Tobias Renn · Acquisition
