The open day exists for the agent, not the building. It compresses viewings into one convenient block, which is efficient for scheduling and disastrous for architecture, because a house that was drawn around four in the afternoon in October is being shown at eleven on a Saturday in June.

It also creates a crowd, and a crowd changes how people look. Nobody stands still in a room with eleven other people in it, and standing still is most of what looking at a building consists of.

We show houses one party at a time, twice, and the second viewing is at the hour the architect drew for. It costs us diary flexibility and it is the reason our median time to offer is nineteen days.