Back when I had 31 empty houses I became very creative very quickly. I learned a lot about how to market houses.

We learned to give ourselves driving time and we advertised different open houses. We did tons of open houses. We’d have Kevin be in one house and Donna would be in another. We'd all show our assigned homes and then we all shift to the next house. It was like clockwork and it worked.

So, the moral to this story is to plan your marketing and open houses well.

Then there is another issue that comes up with open houses. It’s when no one shows up! Don’t get too discouraged when this happens. It’s very typical.

It’s not always about how well you advertised either. Sometimes the stars just aren’t aligned for you and your house.

Marketing an open house is still important though. My local paper has a section that comes out Thursdays. It’s called, "Coming This Weekend." We know that we have to be in that section. That’s where people go to look where the open houses are going to be in the coming weekend.

Your local paper probably has something like that too. You have to be aware of what your paper does when it comes to marketing real estate. Find out what its variation of "Coming This Weekend" is and get yourself into it. Everybody has their name in it, including your competitors.

Remember, potential buyers are looking for houses in a certain area. They are circling the open house info in these sections of the paper. Make sure they have the chance to circle you!

Another great way to market open houses is with real estate signs or bandit signs. We’ll put a sign up on Monday and they have drive-by visibility the whole week.

We have tested the heck out of signs and we have found that big signs work. We also use pointer signs and we make sure the address is written on them. We make sure the address is on it because you’re liable to be pointing at your house and it might look like it’s pointing at a couple houses. Then you run the risk of someone picking the wrong house. We all know it is completely reasonable for there to be multiple bank repo houses on the same street.

How many times have you been driving around looking for a restaurant? You start looking for the signs, right? McDonald’s did a great deed by making a sign that’s recognizable and sticks out. Could you imagine if McDonald’s went with a less obvious sign? We’re all accustomed to looking for the golden arches. They’d end up losing a lot of us.

I don’t want to compare your business to McDonald’s, but you need to have a sign that people can see.

My wife and I recently took a week’s vacation and headed to California. We visited San Francisco, went up to Bodega Bay and stayed all night in Napa Valley. It was beautiful!

We saw other parts of California and then went to Yellowstone before hitting out goal destination, Mount Rushmore.

During this trip, I noticed that there were no billboards. Now in Ohio, we have billboards. I mean they are everywhere. You can’t drive somewhere without seeing on.

There were certain areas that must have had regulations against billboards. It was a little bit different. We had to search a little harder to find the places to eat when we were on the Interstate.

My point with these billboard and McDonald’s references is that you don’t want people to have to search too hard to find your property. It has to be obvious for them to see.