Now that the dust has settled, we've had a chance to look back at the successes and opportunities for all REALTOR® Week Events – Celebrate Albuquerque Day, ABQ Mini Expo and the Open House Weekend.

Celebrate Albuquerque Day

The feedback for Celebrate Albuquerque Day was overwhelmingly positive. According to the survey of attendees, they absolutely loved the New Mexico True presentation by Cabinet Secretary Rebecca Latham and the ABQ Economic Development presentation by Gary Oppedahl. Both tied for 80% as the favorite speaker of the day. Coming in third was the presentation by Albuqueque Convention & Visitor Bureau's Tania Armenta & Eric Searle with 53%. Attendees also appretiated the food with complinents to Rex's Burgers and Flying Star and our chef for the rest of the spread.

Opportunities going forward include more breaks and more time with the main speakers. Many want Gary and Rebecca to return right away for the REALTORS® that missed their presentations. They were that good!

GAAR staff and the LEAP and Community Relations committees will look at how we can bring back popular speakers and hold an even better Celebrate ABQ Day next year.

ABQ Mini Expo

The Mini Expo had some mixed reviews. Some loved it (50%) while almost 20% didn't catch it. Due to location, they missed out on some great resources for their open house. One of the biggest concerns voiced was that it was too cramped and there was not enough networking time. Since the former MLS room (where the expo was held) will now be our new Internet Cafe, we've lost space in the REALTOR® Building to hold it properly.

We are currently looking at several possibilities to have our REALTORS® and affiliate members better network and communicate their product and service offerings.

GAAR's Grande Open House Weekend

The most feedback was saved for our inaugural open house weekend. In planning the event, we started with no real budget and a rough idea. GAAR has never held an event like this before. So, for the first time out we were desparately hoping to attract150 house listings. That would be about double the normal number of open houses on a spring weekend. We ordered what we thought would be more than enough signs, swag bags and balloons. We also invested in advertising to draw enough people to approximately 200 homes.

We were so excited – and a bit nervous – when over 500 houses were signed up! That means 10.5% of  Greater Albueruque's total active residential inventory participated in the open house.  

The feedback to the Open House Weekend was extremely positive. With over 23% of participants responding, most volunteered that it was a great event and absolutely want us to do it again. 75% of  REALTORS® participating found their traffice to be either heavier or about the same. Over 30% saw an increase in traffic. Participating REALTORS® held an average of 2 open houses, with some holding up to 6 over the two day period! 

Over 60% supplemented their own signs with the GAAR Blue signs and balloons.  We weren't surprised when the second and third biggest request was for more signs and more advertising. We are currently working on the budgets for 2016 so we have enough promotional material for all houses (including directional signs) and enough diverse advertising to get the word out to many more people. Our goal will be to drive traffic to at least 750 homes of all sizes, types, price-points and locations.

And the best news of all, there was a 1.1% boost in sales offers in the following week to the residential houses holding open houses over those that didn't. While a jump from 7.1% to 8.2% may not seem large, it is huge compared to the national average which largely shows no noticible increase in sales offers. While open house participants were only 10.5% of the total active residential inventory, they accounted for 12.2% of the homes that changed status from active to pending (or PPS) from April 18th through the 24th.  Not bad for the first year!

Look Forward

We have a lot of ideas for improving all the events – REALTOR® Week, Celebrate Albuquerque Day, The Expo, speakers like Arthur C. Nelson, and the Open House Weekend. But the one, absolute promise we will make is to provide a lot more notice so more REALTORS® can get involved. We're looking forward to the events in 2016 and hope you are as well!