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.
Posted by joycemunro 
Posted by joycemunro 
