The short answer
Rarely on their own: in the National Association of Realtors' buyer survey only a small single-digit share of buyers found the home they bought through an open house or a yard sign, against about half who found it online, so an open house is better understood as a weekend of showings without appointments than as the thing that finds the buyer.
The open house is the most visible thing a listing agent does, which is why sellers judge the whole listing by it and why the question gets asked in this shape. The survey answer is discouraging and the survey answer is not the whole answer. Almost nobody finds their house at an open house. Plenty of people who found the house online first walked through it at one, and a house nobody can walk through does not sell either.
What the surveys actually measure
NAR asks buyers where they first learned about the home they bought. The internet takes about half. The agent takes most of the rest. Yard signs and open house signs together account for a small single-digit share, and that number has been shrinking for twenty years as search moved online.
Note what the question is: where the home was first found, not where the buyer decided. Nobody buys a house they have not walked through, and the open house is one of the ways they walk through it. The survey rules out the open house as a discovery channel. It does not rule it out as the visit that turned a listing on a screen into an offer.
What an open house does do
Three things, all of them real. It compresses the first weekend into a block of showings with no appointments, which matters most in the first week, when a listing gets the most attention it will ever get and when buyers who have been watching for months are ready to move. It produces feedback on price faster than anything else: a busy open house with no offers is a price signal, and an empty one is a louder one.
The third is the one sellers should know about rather than object to. Open houses generate buyer leads for the agent holding them, including buyers who will end up buying something else entirely. That is a normal part of how the business works. It is also why the number of open houses held is a poor measure of how hard a listing is being worked.
What it costs the seller
The house has to be clean, staged, depersonalised and empty of people and pets for four hours, which is a real weekend imposition on anyone living there. Medications, jewellery, spare keys, mail, laptops and anything with an account number on it come with you or go in a locked drawer, because strangers are walking through unaccompanied rooms.
In Nevada, as elsewhere, visitors are normally asked to sign in at the door with a name and contact details. It is not a legal requirement; it is a record of who was in the house, for the seller's security and for the agent's follow-up. A visitor who declines is not obliged to sign, and an agent who wants the house shown will usually let them in anyway.
The alternatives, and who may walk in
Anyone may attend an open house. No appointment, no agent, no pre-approval, no explanation. A buyer already working with an agent should say so at the door and name them, because otherwise the hosting agent may reasonably treat them as an unrepresented buyer, and because the buyer agreement they signed already says who represents them.
The substitutes for a weekend open house are scheduled showings through the lockbox, which reach the same represented buyers with more control and less exposure, and photographs and video, which are what most buyers actually judge the house on before deciding to come at all. Professional photographs remain the highest-return few hundred dollars in the whole listing. Kouzr is a research and marketing platform and not a brokerage: we hold no listings and host no open houses, but the new listings, the price cuts and the days on market on this site are the figures that tell you whether the first weekend worked.
Questions people ask
Can anyone go to an open house?
Yes. An open house is open to the public: no appointment, no agent and no pre-approval needed. You will normally be asked to sign in with a name and contact details, which is the seller's record of who came through rather than any kind of requirement.
Should I hold an open house if my home is vacant?
A vacant home is the easy case: nothing to hide, nobody displaced, and less risk to valuables that are not there. The argument against is unchanged, that few buyers are found this way, and the argument for is that a vacant house costs the seller almost nothing to open.
Do I have to leave during my own open house?
Yes, in practice, and the same reasoning applies as at an inspection: buyers do not say what they think in front of the owner, and the ones who do say it are the ones an agent needs to hear. Take the pets with you.