Real Estate Sign Riders: Sizes, Materials, and Mounting

A listing sign stays in the ground for months. The message on it changes almost weekly. That is what a rider is for: a narrow panel carrying the one thing that just changed — SOLD, PENDING, PRICE REDUCED, OPEN HOUSE SATURDAY — while the sign above it goes on carrying your name and your brokerage.

Houston Sign Company has printed real estate signs for Houston agents, brokers and builders since 1946, riders included. This is how to size them, what to have them printed on, and how they attach to the sign and frame you already own.

What a Rider Is

A rider is a narrow sign panel that mounts together with a larger one. It hangs from hooks below a frame, slides into a channel above the main panel, or stands on its own wire stake beside the sign.

Its job is to be read in about a second, from a moving car, by somebody who already saw your sign last week and stopped noticing it. That is the reason a rider carries one message and nothing else. Put two on a single panel and neither one gets read.

One Message per Rider

Riders fall into four kinds, and they are cheaper to order as a set than one at a time:

• Status. Sold. Pending. Under Contract. Price Reduced. Back on Market. These change while the sign stays put, which is the whole reason the rider is a separate panel.
• Event. Open House, with the day and the hours if your schedule is fixed, and without them if it is not. A rider with the wrong time on it is worse than a plain one.
• Contact. Your name and cell number, so the panel above can stay in the brokerage template.
• Feature. Pool. Corner lot. New roof. Owner financing. One per panel, in the largest type that fits.

Order the status riders at the same time as the sign. A rider you have to reorder in the middle of a listing costs you the days it takes to print, and those are days the sign spends saying nothing new.

Rider Size: Match the Panel Above It

A rider should be as wide as the sign it hangs under and short enough to hold one line of type. The yard sign product on our online store is offered in nine sizes, and 24 x 6 inches is that shape — 24 inches wide, 6 inches tall. Under a 24-inch-wide listing panel, the two read as one sign instead of two.

The rest of the list — 12 x 9, 12 x 12, 18 x 12, 24 x 16, 24 x 18, 24 x 24, 36 x 24 and 48 x 48 inches — are sign sizes rather than rider sizes. When you order panels and riders together, settle the width first and the height second. A rider narrower than the sign looks like a mistake from the street; a rider wider than the sign will not sit in the frame.

Corrugated Plastic, Aluminum, or PVC

Riders spend more time in the trunk of a car than most signs do, and that is harder on them than the weather.

• Corrugated plastic (coroplast) is the least expensive option and works well inside a metal frame. It rarely needs lamination. For Texas, this is what we generally recommend.
• Aluminum, in .040 and .063 thicknesses, and aluminum composite with a polyethylene core, hold up better on a hanging post in high wind. Lamination is optional on these and protects the ink from scratches as panels go in and out of your car.
• PVC (Sintra board) is rigid and prints well, but it can break in high wind and does not do well in extreme heat. In a Houston August that matters.

The trade-offs behind those three run deeper than a rider needs, and we have written them up in full: what real estate signs are made of.

How Riders Mount

There are three situations, and the material follows from which one you are in.

• In a metal frame. The frame carries the main panel and the rider hangs under it or slides in above it. A hanging rider needs grommets, which are an option at checkout on the same product.
• On a hanging post. The panel swings from an arm, so wind moves it constantly. Corrugated plastic is a poor choice here. Aluminum is the usual answer, and lamination is worth it if the panel will travel between listings.
• On its own wire stake. A rider staked beside the sign works as a second message or an arrow pointing at the driveway. Wire stakes are available at checkout.

Have riders printed on both sides when the sign is read from both directions of travel. Single- and double-sided are the same product, chosen at order time. If the panel above it is double-sided, the rider should be too, or half your traffic sees a blank strip under a full sign.

Lead Times, and Where the Sign Can Go

Residential real estate signage runs 2 to 7 business days from concept to completion. Commercial runs 3 to 10, depending on what the installation takes. Riders ordered with the sign come out of the same production run, which is both the fastest and the cheapest way to get them.

What a sign is allowed to say is a separate question from where it is allowed to stand. Before you plan a set of directional riders for a weekend, read where you can put yard signs in Houston.

If you carry more than a handful of listings at a time, the hard part is not putting signs out. It is getting them back, and knowing which ones are still standing. Our site sign management programs track placements, removals and relocations, so a rider that came off a sold listing gets logged instead of lost.

Commercial Listings Work Differently

On commercial property the rider is usually part of a larger quoted sign rather than a stock panel: a brokerage band at the top, the status block below it, and contact details sized for a through road. Commercial real estate signs are quoted per job because the panel size, the posts and the site all change the price, and letter height is set by how far back the sign sits. We have written that calculation out for leasing signage in commercial for lease signs in Houston.

For residential open houses, the rider is one piece of a kit that also includes directional arrows and a sign for the yard itself. The open house kit for Houston realtors covers the rest of it, and how to design real estate signage covers the layout.

Ordering Riders

Corrugated plastic panels are on our store at fixed prices. Upload your artwork, choose the size and options, and check out; shipping is estimated by ZIP code at checkout.

• Custom yard signs — nine sizes from 12 x 9 inches to 48 x 48 inches, including the 24 x 6 rider panel, single- or double-sided, with wire stakes and grommets available at checkout. This is the product for riders, open house signs and directional panels, and it is the same corrugated plastic build as our yard signs in Houston.
• Campaign signs — the same corrugated plastic ordered for volume rather than variety, which is what builders and candidates use when every panel in the run carries one message.

Aluminum riders, metal frames, hanging posts and installation are quoted per job instead of listed, because the material, the hardware and the site decide the price. Tell us the brokerage template you work in, how many listings you expect to sign this year, and which riders you want in the set, and we will come back with a number: send us the details.

Full range and examples: Houston Real Estate Signs.