Why fake sign-ins happen at all
Almost nobody at an open house is trying to scam you - they're just avoiding a small piece of friction. A visitor who's early in their search, not ready to talk to an agent yet, or simply in a hurry to keep looking at other houses that afternoon will often sign in with whatever gets them past the table fastest: a fake name, a phone number that's one digit off, an email that bounces the moment you use it. It's not malicious. It's just the path of least resistance when nothing at the sign-in table actually checks what they typed.
Paper sign-in sheets make this worse because there's no feedback loop at all - a visitor could write gibberish and hand the clipboard back without anyone noticing. A plain digital form isn't much better; it's faster to fill out, but a fake email is still just as easy to type as a real one.
What a fake lead actually costs you
The cost isn't just one wasted email. It compounds in a few specific ways:
- Wasted follow-up time. A call to a dead number or an email that immediately bounces is time you could have spent on someone who'd actually answer.
- A skewed sense of how the weekend went. If a fifth of your "20 visitors" were fake, your actual lead count - and your actual conversion rate - is quietly worse than your spreadsheet says.
- Wasted seller reporting. A report you send a seller that includes a chunk of fake sign-ins overstates real interest in their home, which is the opposite of what that report is supposed to do.
What verification actually checks (and what it doesn't)
"Verified" can mean different things, and it's worth being precise about which one you're getting. Checking that an email address and phone number are real and reachable - the domain has a working mail server, the number belongs to an actual carrier - catches the fake-name-and-fake-contact category outright. It won't tell you whether the person who typed it is actually who they claimed to be; it just confirms the contact info itself isn't made up.
There's a stronger version for open houses where that distinction matters more - requiring a visitor to confirm their phone by texting them a one-time code before their sign-in counts. That proves they actually control the number, not just that the number itself is real, which is the difference between "this contact info could work" and "I can actually reach this person."
This is exactly what ShowSuite checks automatically at the moment someone signs in - every registration gets a real email and phone plausibility check, with optional SMS verification for open houses where you want that stronger guarantee. Your leads list ends up closer to "people worth following up with" than "everyone who touched the clipboard."