We’ve Made It! Well Sort of…

Starting a new business, particularly in this Internet driven world, has been an enlightening experience. Proud to say that after only a couple of months of operation, TheOpenLook.com now frequently returns on the first page of the Google and Yahoo search engines when you search on the terms.

“open houses Raleigh”

“open houses Cary”

“open houses Durham”

For some reason the MSN search engine has not seemed to find us yet.

We’ve seen a significant increase in traffic over the past couple of weeks and are encouraged by the diversity of our users and the homes which are listed. We are on our way to becoming the definitive source of open house listings in the Triangle.

Thanks to all who frequent our site. Let us know what you like and what you don’t. Lastly, help us spread the word. I hope all have a safe and happy July 4th holiday.

Joyce Munro is co-owner, with her husband Wilson, of The Open Look a free tool to post and search open houses in Raleigh, Durham, Cary, Chapel Hill, and the Triangle area of North Carolina. They formed their company in 2006 following their inability to efficiently identify and locate open houses in the Triangle area when they relocated from Lexington, MA. They reside in Cary, NC.

Real Estate is Local

Real estate is local and so is the best information about the local real estate market. It never fails to amaze me the number of real estate websites which purport to serve the entire country. Whether they be FSBO listing services or home valuation services, they somehow always seem to fall short. Why is that? Because information is first and foremost local and trying to gain access to and use that very local information at the national level is extremely difficult.

The Open Look is attempting, on a very local level, in the Triangle area of North Carolina to really serve the local real estate market. We do this in a few of ways:

1. By serving solely the Triangle area with a free open house listing service. Anyone who wants to list an upcoming open house can do so on our site. The more the merrier. In fact, the more open houses listed, the more likely a prospective buyer is to venture out to check them out. Our site allows home buyers to view open houses that meet their criteria as well as build an open house itinerary with maps and directions. They can Click, Print, and Go!

2. By providing access to local service providers who support home buyers and home sellers. Home buyers and sellers need all types of services, ranging from legal to mortgage lending to landscaping to painting to moving to window treatment installation services. And the list goes on. We allow local service providers to post a basic listing of their services for free. If you are or know of a service provider who supports local home buyers or sellers, encourage them to post their services to our site.

3. We will soon be adding a local public resources section of the site, which will feature links to websites of local interest to prospective home buyers. Examples include municipal websites, libraries, school districts, property databases, newspapers, etc. Please let us know if you have suggestions for public links to add to the site.

Margaret Mead once said, “I was brought up to believe that the only thing worth doing was to add to the sum of accurate information in the world.”

I’ll do my small part today by shining a spotlight on Wake County’s Real Estate Data Website which provides good information about Wake County properties and recent sales data, with links to orthophotos (aerial photos) and other maps of the property. You can sort by owner name and street address. Once you are looking at a particular property data file, you can then access ownership history, date of purchase and purchase price, sales data of other properties in the same neighborhood, improvements that have been made to the property, photos, and general lot size and home size information. It’s a great information source.

The Triangle Multiple Listing Service also offers trend analysis and statistics on the Triangle real estate market. Check it out.

Have sources you rely on for your local real estate information? Let me know about them and I’ll pass the word.

Joyce Munro is co-owner, with her husband Wilson, of The Open Look a free tool to post and search open houses in Raleigh, Durham, Cary, Chapel Hill, and the Triangle area of North Carolina. They formed their company in 2006 following their inability to efficiently identify and locate open houses in the Triangle area when they relocated from Lexington, MA. They reside in Cary, NC.

Tongue-Tied at Thursday’s Technology Trade Show

Phew! This past Thursday was a whirlwind for our business. We participated in the Raleigh Regional Association of Realtors’ Technology Trade Show and premiered our website: TheOpenLook.com, a unique way to search open houses in the Raleigh, Durham and Triangle area. We had more than 400 people from the local real estate industry stop by our booth and chat. That’s a lot of talking in the course of one day. By the time 4 pm rolled around, I was mixing up “free on-line open house listing service” with “open on-line listing free service.” It was exhilarating and exhausting all at the same time.

Free is Free

It amazed me that regardless of how many times we would initate a discussion with “we are a free on-line open house listing service for the Triangle area,” inevitably, after showing the many features of the site, the broker would ask, “Now how much are you charging for this service?”

We would reiterate, “It’s free.”

A common response would be, “Well how do you make money?”

Ahhh, now they’re getting to the crux of the business plan–we need the brokers to list their open houses and home buyers and sellers to come here looking for open houses in order for us to be able to sell ad space to businesses providing services to agents, home buyers, and home sellers. One big symbiotic relationship. We just need to get them to believe us–that free is free. All they have to do is use our service and use it religiously and we can bring in the advertisers to financially support their ability to continue to place free open house listings.

Eventually we followed the advice of one agent who said, “Realtor’s love free.” to duct tape small signs to our banner proclaims “Why Not? It’s Free.”

That helped… a bit.

Unintended Consequences

Since the trade show we’ve kept a constant vigil over the site, watching as more and more open houses have been posted. We’ve noticed a significant number of new home communities advertising on the site. While we don’t want to exclude them, we want to make sure that resale houses, staffed with actual agents have prominence on the site, so we’ve created a separate category for listings to distinguish new construction (agent on site at model home or office) from resale properties. This will provide a good level os transparency for buyers–so that they know when they drive to a property whether to expect a “lived in” house with an agent in the house ready to answer questions.

Let Us Know What You Think

Please let us know what you think about the site, by contacting us via our site or my providing comments to this blog below.

Happy Open Housing!

Joyce Munro is co-owner, with her husband Wilson, of The Open Look a free tool to post and search open houses in the Raleigh, Durham, Cary, and Chapel Hill area of North Carolina. They formed their company in 2006 following their inability to efficiently identify and locate open houses in the Triangle area when they relocated from Lexington, MA. They reside in Cary, NC.