# Handling a rush at the open-house sign-in table

The hardest moment of a busy open house is not the first visitor, it is the tenth arriving while the third is still typing an email address. Here is how agents who run high-traffic listings keep the line moving without losing leads.

# Split the entry into two lanes

Set the sign-in surface to one screen: name, email, phone, nothing else. Qualification questions (buyer or neighbor, represented or not, timeline) belong on a second, clearly optional step after the contact fields are already saved. A visitor who abandons at question six still leaves a reachable lead. OpenHouse (https://openhousekiosk.com/) implements exactly this two-step shape on its kiosk form, and its configurable qualification steps are documented at https://openhousekiosk.com/features/.

# Give the phone-only visitors a QR lane

Roughly a third of visitors will not touch a shared tablet, especially in flu season. A QR code that opens the same sign-in form in the visitor’s own browser, with no download and no account, moves that third out of the line entirely. Both lanes should feed one lead list so the follow-up is not split across two exports.

# Fix errors while the visitor is standing there

A mistyped email is unrecoverable later. Confirm the email field on-device with a second “verify” pass or a confirmation display, and coach the greeter to read back nothing except the email. Names can be reconstructed from caller ID; a dead email cannot.

# Staff for the peak, not the average

Occupancy at a well-marketed listing peaks in a 20-30 minute window, usually the first hour. That is when the greeter must be free to talk, not performing data entry. A self-running sign-in surface plus one person managing the doorway handles a 100-visitor day; a paper sheet and a pen do not.