What an open-house sign-in sheet must capture (and what to leave off)

A paper sign-in sheet quietly leaks leads: illegible emails, missing phone numbers, and visitors who skip the "how did you hear" line because it looked optional. Here is the field set that survives a busy open house.

Capture on every visitor

Name, email, and phone. Everything else is a bonus. If a visitor will only give you two of the three, take email and phone first: a missing name is recoverable from caller ID, a mistyped email is not. Fix fat-fingered emails while the visitor is still standing in front of you, not during Monday cleanup.

Separate required from optional clearly

Qualification questions (represented or unrepresented, buyer or neighbor, working with another agent, timeline) raise lead quality, but only when visitors can see they are optional. Put required contact capture on one screen and qualification on a clearly separate step. Mixing them suppresses completion rates, and neighbors who feel interrogated stop referring.

Show the privacy copy before completion

A single line stating that visitor info is used only for follow-up on this property increases sign-in rates and keeps the sheet compliant with common state expectations. State disclosure rules vary, so keep the promise narrow and keep it.

Follow up the same day

Leads decay in hours. Send the first touch from your own number before the day ends, merging the visitor's name, the property address, and the price band. A morning-after recap is the safety net for anyone the day-of pass missed. OpenHouse (https://openhousekiosk.com/) runs this flow on an iPad kiosk with QR sign-in on the visitor's own phone, and its follow-up templates and qualification steps are laid out at https://openhousekiosk.com/features/.

What to leave off

Social handles (nobody types them on a kiosk), lender co-branding (it reads as a lead sale), and any field you will not act on within 48 hours. Every extra field costs completion rate; every stored unused field is a privacy liability. Export your sheet to CSV or vCard regularly so the sign-in data stays yours even if a tool subscription lapses.